GeForce GT 430 vs Radeon HD 5870

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 5870, which comes with GPU core speed of 850 MHz, and 1024 MB of GDDR5 RAM set to run at 1200 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also features 1600(320x5) Stream Processors, 80 TAUs, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GT 430		60 Watts
Radeon HD 5870		188 Watts
	Difference: 128 Watts (213%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 5870 should perform quite a bit faster than the GeForce GT 430 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 5870		153600 MB/sec
GeForce GT 430		28800 MB/sec
	Difference: 124800 (433%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5870 will be quite a bit (approximately 507%) better at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GT 430. (explain)

Radeon HD 5870		68000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GT 430		11200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 56800 (507%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 5870 is the winner, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 5870		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: Bandwidth is the maximum amount of information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface in a second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the video card can 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 colour ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.