GeForce GT 430 vs Radeon HD 4850 1GB

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 4850 1GB, which comes with core speeds of 625 MHz on the GPU, and 993 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR4 memory. It features 800(160x5) SPUs along with 40 Texture Address Units and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GT 430		60 Watts
Radeon HD 4850 1GB		110 Watts
	Difference: 50 Watts (83%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 4850 1GB, in theory, should perform quite a bit faster than the GeForce GT 430 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 4850 1GB		63552 MB/sec
GeForce GT 430		28800 MB/sec
	Difference: 34752 (121%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 4850 1GB will be much (about 123%) better at texture filtering than the GeForce GT 430. (explain)

Radeon HD 4850 1GB		25000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GT 430		11200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 13800 (123%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 4850 1GB is superior to the GeForce GT 430, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 4850 1GB		10000 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GT 430		2800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 7200 (257%)

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: Bandwidth is the largest amount of information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface within a second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, the better 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 can be processed in one second. This is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the graphics card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card can possibly write to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.