GeForce GT 430 vs Radeon HD 4870 1GB

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 4870 1GB, which comes with clock speeds of 750 MHz on the GPU, and 900 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 800(160x5) SPUs as well as 40 Texture Address Units and 16 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 4870 1GB		150 Watts
	Difference: 90 Watts (150%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 4870 1GB should be 300% quicker than the GeForce GT 430 overall, due to its greater data rate. (explain)

Radeon HD 4870 1GB		115200 MB/sec
GeForce GT 430		28800 MB/sec
	Difference: 86400 (300%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 4870 1GB should be much (approximately 168%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the GeForce GT 430. (explain)

Radeon HD 4870 1GB		30000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GT 430		11200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 18800 (168%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 4870 1GB should be quite a bit (about 329%) more effective at FSAA than the GeForce GT 430, and will be capable of handling higher resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

Radeon HD 4870 1GB		12000 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GT 430		2800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 9200 (329%)

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 megabytes per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface in one second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card 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 in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the graphics card can possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output 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 reach the maximum fill rate.