GeForce GT 430 1GB vs Radeon HD 6850

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 6850, which has GPU clock speed of 775 MHz, and 1024 MB of GDDR5 RAM set to run at 1000 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is made up of 960 Stream Processors, 48 Texture Address Units, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GT 430 1GB		60 Watts
Radeon HD 6850		127 Watts
	Difference: 67 Watts (112%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 6850, in theory, should be quite a bit faster than the GeForce GT 430 1GB in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 6850		128000 MB/sec
GeForce GT 430 1GB		28800 MB/sec
	Difference: 99200 (344%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6850 will be quite a bit (more or less 232%) better at AF than the GeForce GT 430 1GB. (explain)

Radeon HD 6850		37200 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GT 430 1GB		11200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 26000 (232%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 6850 is quite a bit (more or less 786%) more effective at anti-aliasing than the GeForce GT 430 1GB, and capable of handling higher screen resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

Radeon HD 6850		24800 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GT 430 1GB		2800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 22000 (786%)

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 data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface in one second. The number is worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the card's memory bandwidth, 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed in one second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total texture units of the card 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 processed in a 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 number is calculated by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.