GeForce GT 430 vs Radeon R9 280

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon R9 280, which features core clock speeds of 933 MHz on the GPU, and 1250 MHz on the 3072 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 1792 SPUs as well as 112 TAUs and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

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

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon R9 280 should perform a lot faster than the GeForce GT 430 overall. (explain)

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

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 280 should be quite a bit (approximately 833%) better at AF than the GeForce GT 430. (explain)

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

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R9 280 is quite a bit (more or less 966%) better at anti-aliasing than the GeForce GT 430, and capable of handling higher screen resolutions more effectively. (explain)

Radeon R9 280		29856 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GT 430		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: Memory bandwidth is the max amount of information (in units of MB per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip could possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.