GeForce GT 430 (OEM) vs Radeon HD 3850 X2

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 3850 X2, which features core speeds of 668 MHz on the GPU, and 828 MHz on the 512 MB of GDDR3 RAM. It features 320(64x5) SPUs along with 16 TAUs and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 3850 X2 should in theory be quite a bit faster than the GeForce GT 430 (OEM) in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 3850 X2		105984 MB/sec
GeForce GT 430 (OEM)		28800 MB/sec
	Difference: 77184 (268%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 3850 X2 will be a lot (about 91%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GT 430 (OEM). (explain)

Radeon HD 3850 X2		21376 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GT 430 (OEM)		11200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 10176 (91%)

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 3850 X2 is superior to the GeForce GT 430 (OEM), by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 3850 X2		21376 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GT 430 (OEM)		2800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 18576 (663%)

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: Bandwidth is the max amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the graphics card can possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the core speed of the card. 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 rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.