GeForce GT 430 vs Radeon R9 380 2G

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon R9 380 2G, which comes with core clock speeds of 970 MHz on the GPU, and 1425 MHz on the 2048 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 1792 SPUs along with 112 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GT 430		60 Watts
Radeon R9 380 2G		190 Watts
	Difference: 130 Watts (217%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon R9 380 2G should theoretically be much faster than the GeForce GT 430 in general. (explain)

Radeon R9 380 2G		182400 MB/sec
GeForce GT 430		28800 MB/sec
	Difference: 153600 (533%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 380 2G is quite a bit (about 870%) more effective at AF than the GeForce GT 430. (explain)

Radeon R9 380 2G		108640 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GT 430		11200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 97440 (870%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon R9 380 2G is a better choice, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon R9 380 2G		31040 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GT 430		2800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 28240 (1009%)

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 largest amount of information (counted in MB per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface in a second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the video card could possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called 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 memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.