GeForce GT 230 vs Radeon HD 7970

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 7970, which comes with core clock speeds of 925 MHz on the GPU, and 1375 MHz on the 3072 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 2048 SPUs along with 128 TAUs and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GT 230		65 Watts
Radeon HD 7970		250 Watts
	Difference: 185 Watts (285%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon HD 7970 should in theory be quite a bit better than the GeForce GT 230 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		264000 MB/sec
GeForce GT 230		38400 MB/sec
	Difference: 225600 (588%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7970 is a lot (approximately 1245%) better at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GT 230. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		118400 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GT 230		8800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 109600 (1245%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 7970 is much (about 573%) better at anti-aliasing than the GeForce GT 230, and able to handle higher screen resolutions while still performing well. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		29600 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GT 230		4400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 25200 (573%)

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 moved over the external memory interface in a second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the video card could possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core 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 ability to get to the max fill rate.