GeForce GT 430 vs Radeon HD 4790

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 4790, which makes use of a 55 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 600 MHz. The GDDR5 memory works at a speed of 800 MHz on this particular model. It features 640(128x5) SPUs along with 32 Texture Address Units and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 4790 should be 256% faster than the GeForce GT 430 overall, due to its greater bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon HD 4790		102400 MB/sec
GeForce GT 430		28800 MB/sec
	Difference: 73600 (256%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 4790 should be quite a bit (about 71%) better at AF than the GeForce GT 430. (explain)

Radeon HD 4790		19200 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GT 430		11200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 8000 (71%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 4790 will be much (approximately 243%) faster with regards to anti-aliasing than the GeForce GT 430, and capable of handling higher resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

Radeon HD 4790		9600 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GT 430		2800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 6800 (243%)

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 max amount of information (in units of MB per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface within a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics card could possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the card's clock speed. 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 also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.