GeForce GT 430 (OEM) vs Radeon HD 6870

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 6870, which has a clock speed of 900 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1050 MHz. It also features a 256-bit bus, and makes use of a 40 nm design. It is comprised of 1120 SPUs, 56 Texture Address Units, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GT 430 (OEM)		60 Watts
Radeon HD 6870		151 Watts
	Difference: 91 Watts (152%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the Radeon HD 6870 should perform a lot faster than the GeForce GT 430 (OEM) in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 6870		134400 MB/sec
GeForce GT 430 (OEM)		28800 MB/sec
	Difference: 105600 (367%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6870 should be much (more or less 350%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the GeForce GT 430 (OEM). (explain)

Radeon HD 6870		50400 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GT 430 (OEM)		11200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 39200 (350%)

Pixel Rate

If using lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6870 is superior to the GeForce GT 430 (OEM), by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 6870		28800 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GT 430 (OEM)		2800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 26000 (929%)

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 (in units of MB per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in a second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once 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 AA, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the video card can possibly record 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 - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.