GeForce GT 430 (OEM) vs Radeon HD 3470 256MB

Intro

The GeForce GT 430 (OEM) features a GPU clock speed of 700 MHz, and the 2048 MB of GDDR3 RAM is set to run at 900 MHz through a 128-bit bus. It also is made up of 96 SPUs, 16 Texture Address Units, and 4 Raster Operation Units.

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 3470 256MB, which makes use of a 55 nm design. AMD has set the core frequency at 800 MHz. The DDR2 memory is set to run at a frequency of 950 MHz on this specific card. It features 40(8x5) SPUs along with 4 Texture Address Units and 4 Rasterization Operator Units.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the largest amount of information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one 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 video card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the video card could possibly write to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.