GeForce GT 430 vs Radeon HD 3470 512MB

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 3470 512MB, which features clock speeds of 800 MHz on the GPU, and 950 MHz on the 512 MB of GDDR3 RAM. It features 40(8x5) SPUs along with 4 Texture Address Units and 4 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 3470 512MB will be 6% quicker than the GeForce GT 430 in general, because of its higher bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon HD 3470 512MB		30400 MB/sec
GeForce GT 430		28800 MB/sec
	Difference: 1600 (6%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GT 430 is much (more or less 250%) faster with regards to AF than the Radeon HD 3470 512MB. (explain)

GeForce GT 430		11200 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3470 512MB		3200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 8000 (250%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 3470 512MB should be just a bit (about 14%) better at AA than the GeForce GT 430, and also should be able to handle higher screen resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

Radeon HD 3470 512MB		3200 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GT 430		2800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 400 (14%)

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 (counted in megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in one second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the bandwidth is, 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 can be applied per second. This number is calculated 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 handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the video card can possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as 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, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.