GeForce GT 430 (OEM) vs Radeon HD 7870 XT

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 7870 XT, which has core speeds of 925 MHz on the GPU, and 1500 MHz on the 2048 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 1536 SPUs along with 96 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GT 430 (OEM)		60 Watts
Radeon HD 7870 XT		185 Watts
	Difference: 125 Watts (208%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 7870 XT should be 567% quicker than the GeForce GT 430 (OEM) overall, because of its higher data rate. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870 XT		192000 MB/sec
GeForce GT 430 (OEM)		28800 MB/sec
	Difference: 163200 (567%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7870 XT will be quite a bit (about 693%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the GeForce GT 430 (OEM). (explain)

Radeon HD 7870 XT		88800 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GT 430 (OEM)		11200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 77600 (693%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 7870 XT is quite a bit (about 957%) better at FSAA than the GeForce GT 430 (OEM), and also capable of handling higher screen resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870 XT		29600 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GT 430 (OEM)		2800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 26800 (957%)

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.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the max amount of data (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface in a second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units 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 processed in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the video card could possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.