GeForce GT 430 vs Radeon HD 6950

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 6950, which features GPU clock speed of 800 MHz, and 1024 MB of GDDR5 RAM running at 1250 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is made up of 1408 Stream Processors, 88 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		60 Watts
Radeon HD 6950		200 Watts
	Difference: 140 Watts (233%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 6950 should theoretically be quite a bit faster than the GeForce GT 430 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950		160000 MB/sec
GeForce GT 430		28800 MB/sec
	Difference: 131200 (456%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6950 is much (approximately 529%) better at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GT 430. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950		70400 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GT 430		11200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 59200 (529%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6950 is superior to the GeForce GT 430, by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950		25600 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GT 430		2800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 22800 (814%)

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 transported across the external memory interface in one second. It is calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics card could possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.