GeForce GT 430 vs Radeon HD 3850 512MB

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 3850 512MB, which has GPU clock speed of 668 MHz, and 512 MB of GDDR3 RAM set to run at 828 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is comprised of 320(64x5) SPUs, 16 Texture Address Units, and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GT 430		60 Watts
Radeon HD 3850 512MB		75 Watts
	Difference: 15 Watts (25%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon HD 3850 512MB should theoretically be much better than the GeForce GT 430 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 3850 512MB		52992 MB/sec
GeForce GT 430		28800 MB/sec
	Difference: 24192 (84%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GT 430 should be a little bit (approximately 5%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 3850 512MB. (explain)

GeForce GT 430		11200 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 512MB		10688 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 512 (5%)

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 3850 512MB is superior to the GeForce GT 430, by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 3850 512MB		10688 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GT 430		2800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 7888 (282%)

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 (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 speed. If it uses DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better 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 texture map elements (texels) that can be processed in one second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip can possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.