GeForce GT 430 (OEM) vs Radeon HD 3470 512MB

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 3470 512MB, which comes with clock speeds of 800 MHz on the GPU, and 950 MHz on the 512 MB of GDDR3 RAM. It features 40(8x5) SPUs along with 4 Texture Address Units and 4 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 3470 512MB should theoretically perform just a bit faster than the GeForce GT 430 (OEM) in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 3470 512MB		30400 MB/sec
GeForce GT 430 (OEM)		28800 MB/sec
	Difference: 1600 (6%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GT 430 (OEM) should be much (approximately 250%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 3470 512MB. (explain)

GeForce GT 430 (OEM)		11200 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3470 512MB		3200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 8000 (250%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 3470 512MB should be just a bit (approximately 14%) faster with regards to full screen anti-aliasing than the GeForce GT 430 (OEM), and also capable of handling higher screen resolutions better. (explain)

Radeon HD 3470 512MB		3200 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GT 430 (OEM)		2800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 400 (14%)

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 information (in units of MB per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The better this number, 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 that the graphics chip can possibly record to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the card's 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 is also dependant on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.