GeForce GT 430 vs Radeon R9 280

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon R9 280, which uses a 28 nm design. AMD has set the core speed at 933 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM runs at a frequency of 1250 MHz on this card. It features 1792 SPUs as well as 112 TAUs and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

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

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon R9 280 should be 733% faster than the GeForce GT 430 in general, because of its higher data rate. (explain)

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

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 280 is quite a bit (more or less 833%) more effective at anisotropic filtering 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 will be a lot (approximately 966%) faster with regards to anti-aliasing than the GeForce GT 430, and also will be capable of handling higher 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: Bandwidth is the largest amount of information (counted in MB per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in one second. It's worked out by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed in one second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the graphics card could possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.