GeForce GT 430 vs Radeon HD 6850

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 6850, which makes use of a 40 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 775 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM works at a frequency of 1000 MHz on this particular model. It features 960 SPUs as well as 48 TAUs and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GT 430		60 Watts
Radeon HD 6850		127 Watts
	Difference: 67 Watts (112%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 6850 will be 344% quicker than the GeForce GT 430 in general, due to its greater data rate. (explain)

Radeon HD 6850		128000 MB/sec
GeForce GT 430		28800 MB/sec
	Difference: 99200 (344%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6850 should be quite a bit (more or less 232%) better at AF than the GeForce GT 430. (explain)

Radeon HD 6850		37200 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GT 430		11200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 26000 (232%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 6850 will be quite a bit (more or less 786%) better at FSAA than the GeForce GT 430, and should be able to handle higher resolutions better. (explain)

Radeon HD 6850		24800 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GT 430		2800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 22000 (786%)

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 data (in units of MB per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in one second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR 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 AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core clock 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 per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card could possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on many 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.