GeForce GT 430 (OEM) vs Radeon R9 280

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon R9 280, which makes use of 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 specific card. It features 1792 SPUs as well as 112 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

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

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon R9 280 should perform much faster than the GeForce GT 430 (OEM) in general. (explain)

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

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 280 will be much (about 833%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GT 430 (OEM). (explain)

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

Pixel Rate

If running with a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon R9 280 is the winner, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon R9 280		29856 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GT 430 (OEM)		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 max amount of data (in units of MB per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface within a second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, the faster 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 can be applied in one second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the graphics card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the graphics card could possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of Render Output Units 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 lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.