GeForce GT 230 vs Radeon HD 7990

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 7990, which uses a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 950 MHz. The GDDR5 memory is set to run at a speed of 1500 MHz on this card. It features 2048 SPUs as well as 128 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GT 230		65 Watts
Radeon HD 7990		375 Watts
	Difference: 310 Watts (477%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 7990 should be much faster than the GeForce GT 230 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 7990		576000 MB/sec
GeForce GT 230		38400 MB/sec
	Difference: 537600 (1400%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7990 should be a lot (about 2664%) more effective at AF than the GeForce GT 230. (explain)

Radeon HD 7990		243200 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GT 230		8800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 234400 (2664%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 7990 is quite a bit (more or less 1282%) faster with regards to full screen anti-aliasing than the GeForce GT 230, and should be capable of handling higher resolutions while still performing well. (explain)

Radeon HD 7990		60800 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GT 230		4400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 56400 (1282%)

Please note that the above 'benchmarks' are all just theoretical - the results were calculated based on the card's specifications, and real-world performance may (and probably will) vary at least a bit.

One or more cards in this comparison are multi-core. This means that their bandwidth, texel and pixel rates are theoretically doubled - this does not mean the card will actually perform twice as fast, but only that it should in theory be able to. Actual game benchmarks will give a more accurate idea of what it's capable of.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the largest amount of data (counted in megabytes per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are processed in one second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the graphics card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card could possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel fill rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.