GeForce GT 430 (OEM) vs Radeon HD 5870

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 5870, which comes with GPU core speed of 850 MHz, and 1024 MB of GDDR5 memory running at 1200 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is comprised of 1600(320x5) Stream Processors, 80 Texture Address Units, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GT 430 (OEM)		60 Watts
Radeon HD 5870		188 Watts
	Difference: 128 Watts (213%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 5870 will be 433% faster than the GeForce GT 430 (OEM) in general, due to its greater data rate. (explain)

Radeon HD 5870		153600 MB/sec
GeForce GT 430 (OEM)		28800 MB/sec
	Difference: 124800 (433%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5870 will be quite a bit (more or less 507%) better at AF than the GeForce GT 430 (OEM). (explain)

Radeon HD 5870		68000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GT 430 (OEM)		11200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 56800 (507%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 5870 will be a lot (about 871%) better at anti-aliasing than the GeForce GT 430 (OEM), and also will be able to handle higher screen resolutions while still performing well. (explain)

Radeon HD 5870		27200 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GT 430 (OEM)		2800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 24400 (871%)

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 past the external memory interface in one second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, the better 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 applied per second. This is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core clock 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 per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the video card could possibly record to the local memory in a 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 outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.