GeForce GT 430 1GB vs Radeon HD 4550 512MB

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 4550 512MB, which comes with a GPU core clock speed of 600 MHz, and 512 MB of GDDR3 memory set to run at 800 MHz through a 64-bit bus. It also features 80(16x5) Stream Processors, 8 TAUs, and 4 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 4550 512MB		25 Watts
GeForce GT 430 1GB		60 Watts
	Difference: 35 Watts (140%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the GeForce GT 430 1GB should perform much faster than the Radeon HD 4550 512MB overall. (explain)

GeForce GT 430 1GB		28800 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4550 512MB		12800 MB/sec
	Difference: 16000 (125%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GT 430 1GB should be much (more or less 133%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the Radeon HD 4550 512MB. (explain)

GeForce GT 430 1GB		11200 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4550 512MB		4800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 6400 (133%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GT 430 1GB is a little bit (about 17%) better at full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 4550 512MB, and also capable of handling higher resolutions better. (explain)

GeForce GT 430 1GB		2800 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4550 512MB		2400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 400 (17%)

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 within a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core clock 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 processed in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics card can possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of colour ROPs 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 rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.