GeForce GT 430 1GB vs Radeon R9 280

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon R9 280, which uses a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 933 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM is set to run at a frequency of 1250 MHz on this particular card. It features 1792 SPUs along with 112 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GT 430 1GB		60 Watts
Radeon R9 280		250 Watts
	Difference: 190 Watts (317%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon R9 280 should in theory be much superior to the GeForce GT 430 1GB in general. (explain)

Radeon R9 280		240000 MB/sec
GeForce GT 430 1GB		28800 MB/sec
	Difference: 211200 (733%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 280 will be quite a bit (about 833%) faster with regards to AF than the GeForce GT 430 1GB. (explain)

Radeon R9 280		104496 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GT 430 1GB		11200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 93296 (833%)

Pixel Rate

If running with lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon R9 280 is a better choice, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon R9 280		29856 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GT 430 1GB		2800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 27056 (966%)

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 largest amount of data (measured in MB per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in one second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be processed in one second. This is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the video card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the video card could possibly write 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 the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel output rate also depends on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.