GeForce GT 430 (OEM) vs Radeon HD 5550

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 5550, which makes use of a 40 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 550 MHz. The DDR2 memory works at a frequency of 400 MHz on this model. It features 320(64x5) SPUs along with 16 Texture Address Units and 8 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

The GeForce GT 430 (OEM) should theoretically perform much faster than the Radeon HD 5550 in general. (explain)

GeForce GT 430 (OEM)		28800 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5550		12800 MB/sec
	Difference: 16000 (125%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GT 430 (OEM) should be a lot (more or less 27%) better at AF than the Radeon HD 5550. (explain)

GeForce GT 430 (OEM)		11200 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5550		8800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 2400 (27%)

Pixel Rate

If running with lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon HD 5550 is superior to the GeForce GT 430 (OEM), by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 5550		4400 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GT 430 (OEM)		2800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 1600 (57%)

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 max amount of data (measured in MB per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied in one second. This is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the graphics card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics card could possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number 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 many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.