GeForce GT 430 vs Radeon HD 3870 512MB

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 3870 512MB, which makes use of a 55 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 775 MHz. The GDDR3 RAM works at a speed of 900 MHz on this model. It features 320(64x5) SPUs as well as 16 Texture Address Units and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GT 430		60 Watts
Radeon HD 3870 512MB		106 Watts
	Difference: 46 Watts (77%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 3870 512MB should be 100% quicker than the GeForce GT 430 in general, due to its higher data rate. (explain)

Radeon HD 3870 512MB		57600 MB/sec
GeForce GT 430		28800 MB/sec
	Difference: 28800 (100%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 3870 512MB is a bit (approximately 11%) more effective at texture filtering than the GeForce GT 430. (explain)

Radeon HD 3870 512MB		12400 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GT 430		11200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 1200 (11%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 3870 512MB is superior to the GeForce GT 430, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 3870 512MB		12400 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GT 430		2800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 9600 (343%)

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 megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in one second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total 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 processed per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip can possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.