In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the Nvidia GeForce GT 730 v3 Gigabyte 2GB Edition are significantly better than the AMD Radeon HD 6450 Sapphire OC 512MB Edition.

The HD 6450 has a 50 MHz higher core clock speed than the GT 730, but the GT 730 has 8 more Texture Mapping Units than the HD 6450. As a result, the GT 730 exhibits a 5.2 GTexel/s better Texture Fill Rate than the HD 6450. This still holds weight but shader performance is generally more relevant, particularly since both of these GPUs support at least DirectX 10.

The HD 6450 has a 50 MHz higher core clock speed than the GT 730 and the same number of Render Output Units. This results in the HD 6450 providing 0.2 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 GT 730 was released over three years more recently than the HD 6450, and so the GT 730 is likely to have far better driver support, meaning it will be much more optimized and ultimately superior to the HD 6450 when running the latest games.

The GT 730 has 1536 MB more video memory than the HD 6450, so is likely to be much better at displaying game textures at higher resolutions. This is supported by the fact that the GT 730 also has superior memory performance overall.

The GT 730 has 3.2 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the HD 6450, which means that the memory performance of the GT 730 is marginally better than the HD 6450.

The Radeon HD 6450 Sapphire OC 512MB Edition has 160 Shader Processing Units and the GeForce GT 730 v3 Gigabyte 2GB Edition has 96. However, the actual shader performance of the HD 6450 is 60 and the actual shader performance of the GT 730 is 134. The GT 730 having 74 better shader performance and an altogether better performance when taking into account other relevant data means that the GT 730 delivers a marginally smoother and more efficient experience when processing graphical data than the HD 6450.

The Radeon HD 6450 Sapphire OC 512MB Edition requires 18 Watts to run and the GeForce GT 730 v3 Gigabyte 2GB Edition requires 49 Watts. We would recommend a PSU with at least 300 Watts for the HD 6450 and a PSU with at least 300 Watts for the GT 730. The GT 730 requires 31 Watts more than the HD 6450 to run. The difference is significant enough that the GT 730 may have a slight adverse affect on your yearly electricity bills in comparison to the HD 6450.