In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the AMD Radeon R7 240 2GB are significantly better than the Nvidia GeForce GT 430 Zotac Synergy 4GB Edition.

The R7 240 has a 30 MHz higher core clock speed and 4 more Texture Mapping Units than the GT 430. This results in the R7 240 providing 3.4 GTexel/s better texturing performance. This still holds weight but shader performance is generally more relevant, particularly since both of these GPUs support at least DirectX 10.

The R7 240 has a 30 MHz higher core clock speed and 4 more Render Output Units than the GT 430. This results in the R7 240 providing 3 GPixel/s better pixeling performance. However, both GPUs support DirectX 9 or above, and pixeling performance is only really relevant when comparing older cards.

The R7 240 was released over three years more recently than the GT 430, and so the R7 240 is likely to have far better driver support, meaning it will be much more optimized and ultimately superior to the GT 430 when running the latest games.

The GT 430 has 2048 MB more video memory than the R7 240, so is likely to be much better at displaying game textures at higher resolutions. However, overall, the R7 240 has superior memory performance.

The R7 240 has 11.7 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the GT 430, which means that the memory performance of the R7 240 is slightly better than the GT 430.

The GeForce GT 430 Zotac Synergy 4GB Edition has 96 Shader Processing Units and the Radeon R7 240 2GB has 320. However, the actual shader performance of the GT 430 is 134 and the actual shader performance of the R7 240 is 212. The R7 240 having 78 better shader performance and an altogether better performance when taking into account other relevant data means that the R7 240 delivers a slightly smoother and more efficient experience when processing graphical data than the GT 430.

The R7 240 transistor size technology is 12 nm (nanometers) smaller than the GT 430. This means that the R7 240 is expected to run slightly cooler and achieve higher clock frequencies than the GT 430.

The GeForce GT 430 Zotac Synergy 4GB Edition requires 49 Watts to run and the Radeon R7 240 2GB requires 30 Watts. We would recommend a PSU with at least 300 Watts for the GT 430 and a PSU with at least 400 Watts for the R7 240. The GT 430 requires 19 Watts more than the R7 240 to run. The difference is not significant enough for the GT 430 to have a noticeably larger impact on your yearly electricity bills than the R7 240.