GeForce GT 430 (OEM) vs Radeon HD 6850

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 6850, which uses a 40 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 775 MHz. The GDDR5 memory works at a frequency of 1000 MHz on this particular card. It features 960 SPUs as well as 48 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GT 430 (OEM)		60 Watts
Radeon HD 6850		127 Watts
	Difference: 67 Watts (112%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 6850 should theoretically be a lot faster than the GeForce GT 430 (OEM) in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 6850		128000 MB/sec
GeForce GT 430 (OEM)		28800 MB/sec
	Difference: 99200 (344%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6850 will be quite a bit (more or less 232%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GT 430 (OEM). (explain)

Radeon HD 6850		37200 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GT 430 (OEM)		11200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 26000 (232%)

Pixel Rate

If using lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6850 is the winner, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon HD 6850		24800 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GT 430 (OEM)		2800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 22000 (786%)

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 data (in units of MB per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface within a second. It's worked out by multiplying the interface width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's memory bandwidth, 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 texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the video card will be at 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 graphics card can possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines 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 rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.