GeForce 8800 Ultra vs GeForce GT 430

Intro

Compare those specifications to the GeForce GT 430, which features core clock speeds of 700 MHz on the GPU, and 900 MHz on the 512 MB of GDDR3 RAM. It features 96 SPUs as well as 16 Texture Address Units and 4 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GT 430		60 Watts
GeForce 8800 Ultra		171 Watts
	Difference: 111 Watts (185%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the GeForce 8800 Ultra should be quite a bit faster than the GeForce GT 430 overall. (explain)

GeForce 8800 Ultra		103680 MB/sec
GeForce GT 430		28800 MB/sec
	Difference: 74880 (260%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce 8800 Ultra is a lot (more or less 250%) better at texture filtering than the GeForce GT 430. (explain)

GeForce 8800 Ultra		39168 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GT 430		11200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 27968 (250%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high resolution is important to you, then the GeForce 8800 Ultra is the winner, and very much so. (explain)

GeForce 8800 Ultra		14688 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GT 430		2800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 11888 (425%)

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 largest amount of information (in units of MB per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in a second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card could possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also 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, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.