GeForce GT 430 vs Radeon R9 280X

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon R9 280X, which uses a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 850 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM is set to run at a speed of 1500 MHz on this specific card. It features 2048 SPUs along with 128 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GT 430		60 Watts
Radeon R9 280X		250 Watts
	Difference: 190 Watts (317%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon R9 280X will be 900% faster than the GeForce GT 430 overall, due to its higher bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon R9 280X		288000 MB/sec
GeForce GT 430		28800 MB/sec
	Difference: 259200 (900%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 280X should be quite a bit (more or less 871%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GT 430. (explain)

Radeon R9 280X		108800 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GT 430		11200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 97600 (871%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon R9 280X is the winner, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon R9 280X		27200 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GT 430		2800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 24400 (871%)

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 largest amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in one second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the graphics card will be at 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 could possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.