GeForce GT 430 vs Radeon HD 4730

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 4730, which comes with a core clock frequency of 700 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 900 MHz. It also features a 128-bit memory bus, and makes use of a 55 nm design. It features 640(128x5) SPUs, 32 Texture Address Units, and 8 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GT 430		60 Watts
Radeon HD 4730		140 Watts
	Difference: 80 Watts (133%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the Radeon HD 4730 should be a lot faster than the GeForce GT 430 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 4730		57600 MB/sec
GeForce GT 430		28800 MB/sec
	Difference: 28800 (100%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 4730 is quite a bit (about 100%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GT 430. (explain)

Radeon HD 4730		22400 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GT 430		11200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 11200 (100%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 4730 is a lot (about 100%) better at anti-aliasing than the GeForce GT 430, and also capable of handling higher resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

Radeon HD 4730		5600 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GT 430		2800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 2800 (100%)

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

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the video card could possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on many 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.