GeForce GT 430 vs Radeon HD 4790

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 4790, which features a clock speed of 600 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 800 MHz. It also makes use of a 256-bit bus, and uses a 55 nm design. It is comprised of 640(128x5) SPUs, 32 Texture Address Units, and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 4790, in theory, should perform much faster than the GeForce GT 430 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 4790		102400 MB/sec
GeForce GT 430		28800 MB/sec
	Difference: 73600 (256%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 4790 should be a lot (approximately 71%) better at texture filtering than the GeForce GT 430. (explain)

Radeon HD 4790		19200 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GT 430		11200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 8000 (71%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 4790 is the winner, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 4790		9600 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GT 430		2800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 6800 (243%)

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 max amount of data (measured in MB per second) that can be moved over 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 RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are processed in one second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the video card can possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.