GeForce GT 230 vs GeForce GT 430

Intro

Compare those specifications to the GeForce GT 430, which has core clock speeds of 700 MHz on the GPU, and 900 MHz on the 512 MB of GDDR3 RAM. It features 96 SPUs as well as 16 Texture Address Units and 4 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GT 430		60 Watts
GeForce GT 230		65 Watts
	Difference: 5 Watts (8%)

Memory Bandwidth

The GeForce GT 230 should in theory be much faster than the GeForce GT 430 overall. (explain)

GeForce GT 230		38400 MB/sec
GeForce GT 430		28800 MB/sec
	Difference: 9600 (33%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GT 430 is quite a bit (approximately 27%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GT 230. (explain)

GeForce GT 430		11200 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GT 230		8800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 2400 (27%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GT 230 will be a lot (approximately 57%) more effective at AA than the GeForce GT 430, and will be able to handle higher screen resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

GeForce GT 230		4400 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GT 430		2800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 1600 (57%)

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 (counted in megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that are processed in one second. This is worked out by multiplying the total texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the graphics card will be at handling 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 graphics card can possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.