GeForce GT 430 (OEM) vs Radeon HD 3870 X2 512MB

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 3870 X2 512MB, which features core speeds of 825 MHz on the GPU, and 900 MHz on the 512 MB of GDDR3 RAM. It features 320(64x5) SPUs as well as 16 Texture Address Units and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon HD 3870 X2 512MB should theoretically be quite a bit superior to the GeForce GT 430 (OEM) in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 3870 X2 512MB		115200 MB/sec
GeForce GT 430 (OEM)		28800 MB/sec
	Difference: 86400 (300%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 3870 X2 512MB should be a lot (about 136%) faster with regards to AF than the GeForce GT 430 (OEM). (explain)

Radeon HD 3870 X2 512MB		26400 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GT 430 (OEM)		11200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 15200 (136%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 3870 X2 512MB is superior to the GeForce GT 430 (OEM), by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 3870 X2 512MB		26400 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GT 430 (OEM)		2800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 23600 (843%)

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.

One or more cards in this comparison are multi-core. This means that their bandwidth, texel and pixel rates are theoretically doubled - this does not mean the card will actually perform twice as fast, but only that it should in theory be able to. Actual game benchmarks will give a more accurate idea of what it's capable of.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the max amount of data (in units of MB per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR type RAM, it must 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 anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card could possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel fill rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.