GeForce GT 430 vs Radeon HD 4870 X2

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 4870 X2, which features core speeds of 750 MHz on the GPU, and 900 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 800(160x5) SPUs along with 40 Texture Address Units and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GT 430		60 Watts
Radeon HD 4870 X2		350 Watts
	Difference: 290 Watts (483%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 4870 X2 should be a lot faster than the GeForce GT 430 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 4870 X2		230400 MB/sec
GeForce GT 430		28800 MB/sec
	Difference: 201600 (700%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 4870 X2 is much (approximately 436%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the GeForce GT 430. (explain)

Radeon HD 4870 X2		60000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GT 430		11200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 48800 (436%)

Pixel Rate

If running with lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon HD 4870 X2 is superior to the GeForce GT 430, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 4870 X2		24000 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GT 430		2800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 21200 (757%)

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 information (in units of MB per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in one second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core 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 in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.