GeForce GT 430 vs Radeon HD 3650 256MB

Intro

The GeForce GT 430 makes use of a 40 nm design. nVidia has clocked the core frequency at 700 MHz. The GDDR3 memory is set to run at a frequency of 900 MHz on this model. It features 96 SPUs as well as 16 TAUs and 4 Rasterization Operator Units.

Compare that to the Radeon HD 3650 256MB, which has a GPU core clock speed of 725 MHz, and 256 MB of DDR2 RAM running at 800 MHz through a 128-bit bus. It also is made up of 120(24x5) Stream Processors, 8 TAUs, and 4 ROPs.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the maximum amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in one second. It's calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high 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 better the texel rate, the better the video card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the graphics card can possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the number of ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.