GeForce GT 430 vs Radeon HD 3690/3830

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 3690/3830, which comes with GPU clock speed of 668 MHz, and 256 MB of GDDR3 RAM set to run at 828 MHz through a 128-bit bus. It also features 320(64x5) Stream Processors, 16 Texture Address Units, and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GT 430		60 Watts
Radeon HD 3690/3830		75 Watts
	Difference: 15 Watts (25%)

Memory Bandwidth

The GeForce GT 430 should in theory perform just a bit faster than the Radeon HD 3690/3830 overall. (explain)

GeForce GT 430		28800 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3690/3830		26496 MB/sec
	Difference: 2304 (9%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GT 430 is a little bit (about 5%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 3690/3830. (explain)

GeForce GT 430		11200 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3690/3830		10688 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 512 (5%)

Pixel Rate

If using lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon HD 3690/3830 is superior to the GeForce GT 430, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 3690/3830		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: Memory bandwidth is the largest amount of data (measured in MB per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface within a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics card could possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure 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 drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.