GeForce GT 430 vs Radeon HD 6970

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 6970, which makes use of a 40 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 880 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM runs at a frequency of 1375 MHz on this particular card. It features 1536 SPUs as well as 96 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GT 430		60 Watts
Radeon HD 6970		250 Watts
	Difference: 190 Watts (317%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 6970, in theory, should be much faster than the GeForce GT 430 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		176000 MB/sec
GeForce GT 430		28800 MB/sec
	Difference: 147200 (511%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6970 should be much (about 654%) more effective at AF than the GeForce GT 430. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		84480 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GT 430		11200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 73280 (654%)

Pixel Rate

If using lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6970 is superior to the GeForce GT 430, by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		28160 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GT 430		2800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 25360 (906%)

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 data (in units of MB per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the video card can possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number 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 rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.