GeForce GT 230 vs GeForce GT 430

Intro

The GeForce GT 230 comes with a clock speed of 550 MHz and a DDR3 memory frequency of 800 MHz. It also uses a 192-bit memory bus, and makes use of a 40 nm design. It is comprised of 32 SPUs, 16 Texture Address Units, and 8 ROPs.

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

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the maximum amount of information (counted in MB per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip can possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.