GeForce GT 430 1GB vs Radeon HD 3690/3830

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 3690/3830, which makes use of a 55 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 668 MHz. The GDDR3 RAM is set to run at a speed of 828 MHz on this specific card. It features 320(64x5) SPUs along with 16 Texture Address Units and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GT 430 1GB		60 Watts
Radeon HD 3690/3830		75 Watts
	Difference: 15 Watts (25%)

Memory Bandwidth

The GeForce GT 430 1GB, in theory, should be a little bit faster than the Radeon HD 3690/3830 overall. (explain)

GeForce GT 430 1GB		28800 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3690/3830		26496 MB/sec
	Difference: 2304 (9%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GT 430 1GB will be a bit (about 5%) more effective at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 3690/3830. (explain)

GeForce GT 430 1GB		11200 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3690/3830		10688 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 512 (5%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 3690/3830 should be quite a bit (approximately 282%) faster with regards to AA than the GeForce GT 430 1GB, and able to handle higher screen resolutions while still performing well. (explain)

Radeon HD 3690/3830		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: Bandwidth is the maximum amount of information (counted in MB per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This is calculated by multiplying the total texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the graphics 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 maximum amount of pixels that the graphics card can possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.