GeForce GT 230 vs Radeon HD 6990

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 6990, which makes use of a 40 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 830 MHz. The GDDR5 memory is set to run at a speed of 1250 MHz on this specific card. It features 1536 SPUs as well as 96 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GT 230		65 Watts
Radeon HD 6990		375 Watts
	Difference: 310 Watts (477%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 6990 should perform quite a bit faster than the GeForce GT 230 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 6990		320000 MB/sec
GeForce GT 230		38400 MB/sec
	Difference: 281600 (733%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6990 is much (about 1711%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the GeForce GT 230. (explain)

Radeon HD 6990		159360 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GT 230		8800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 150560 (1711%)

Pixel Rate

If running with lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6990 is a better choice, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon HD 6990		53120 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GT 230		4400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 48720 (1107%)

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.

One or more cards in this comparison are multi-core. This means that their bandwidth, texel and pixel rates are theoretically doubled - this does not mean the card will actually perform twice as fast, but only that it should in theory be able to. Actual game benchmarks will give a more accurate idea of what it's capable of.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the max amount of data (measured in MB per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface within a second. It's worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR type memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the graphics card can possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as 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, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.