GeForce GT 430 (OEM) vs Radeon R9 290

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon R9 290, which has a clock frequency of 800 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1250 MHz. It also makes use of a 512-bit memory bus, and makes use of a 28 nm design. It is comprised of 2560 SPUs, 160 Texture Address Units, and 64 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GT 430 (OEM)		60 Watts
Radeon R9 290		300 Watts
	Difference: 240 Watts (400%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon R9 290 should in theory perform much faster than the GeForce GT 430 (OEM) overall. (explain)

Radeon R9 290		320000 MB/sec
GeForce GT 430 (OEM)		28800 MB/sec
	Difference: 291200 (1011%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 290 will be quite a bit (about 1043%) better at AF than the GeForce GT 430 (OEM). (explain)

Radeon R9 290		128000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GT 430 (OEM)		11200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 116800 (1043%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R9 290 should be quite a bit (approximately 1729%) better at AA than the GeForce GT 430 (OEM), and also able to handle higher screen resolutions while still performing well. (explain)

Radeon R9 290		51200 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GT 430 (OEM)		2800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 48400 (1729%)

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 information (counted in MB per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface within a second. It is calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR type memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, the better 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in one second.

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