GeForce GT 430 vs Radeon HD 4550 512MB

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 4550 512MB, which has a GPU core clock speed of 600 MHz, and 512 MB of GDDR3 memory set to run at 800 MHz through a 64-bit bus. It also features 80(16x5) Stream Processors, 8 Texture Address Units, and 4 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 4550 512MB		25 Watts
GeForce GT 430		60 Watts
	Difference: 35 Watts (140%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the GeForce GT 430 should in theory be much superior to the Radeon HD 4550 512MB overall. (explain)

GeForce GT 430		28800 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4550 512MB		12800 MB/sec
	Difference: 16000 (125%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GT 430 will be quite a bit (approximately 133%) more effective at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 4550 512MB. (explain)

GeForce GT 430		11200 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4550 512MB		4800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 6400 (133%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high resolution is important to you, then the GeForce GT 430 is superior to the Radeon HD 4550 512MB, but only just. (explain)

GeForce GT 430		2800 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4550 512MB		2400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 400 (17%)

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 maximum amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in one second. It is worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 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 anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics card can possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.