GeForce GT 430 vs Radeon HD 5850

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 5850, which has GPU clock speed of 725 MHz, and 1024 MB of GDDR5 memory set to run at 1000 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also features 1440(288x5) Stream Processors, 72 TAUs, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GT 430		60 Watts
Radeon HD 5850		151 Watts
	Difference: 91 Watts (152%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 5850 should be 344% quicker than the GeForce GT 430 overall, due to its greater data rate. (explain)

Radeon HD 5850		128000 MB/sec
GeForce GT 430		28800 MB/sec
	Difference: 99200 (344%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5850 should be quite a bit (more or less 366%) faster with regards to AF than the GeForce GT 430. (explain)

Radeon HD 5850		52200 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GT 430		11200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 41000 (366%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 5850 is superior to the GeForce GT 430, by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 5850		23200 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GT 430		2800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 20400 (729%)

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 information (measured in MB per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface in a second. It is calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once 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 texture map elements (texels) that can be processed in one second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the video 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 most pixels that the graphics chip could possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.