GeForce GT 430 1GB vs Radeon HD 3850 1GB

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 3850 1GB, which comes with GPU clock speed of 668 MHz, and 1024 MB of GDDR3 RAM set to run at 828 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is made up of 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 1GB		60 Watts
Radeon HD 3850 1GB		75 Watts
	Difference: 15 Watts (25%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 3850 1GB should theoretically perform quite a bit faster than the GeForce GT 430 1GB overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 3850 1GB		52992 MB/sec
GeForce GT 430 1GB		28800 MB/sec
	Difference: 24192 (84%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GT 430 1GB will be a little bit (more or less 5%) more effective at AF than the Radeon HD 3850 1GB. (explain)

GeForce GT 430 1GB		11200 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 1GB		10688 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 512 (5%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 3850 1GB is the winner, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon HD 3850 1GB		10688 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GT 430 1GB		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 maximum amount of information (measured in MB per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in one second. It's worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. In the case of 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 faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the video card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in a second.

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