Radeon HD 3470 256MB vs Radeon HD 6790

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 6790, which comes with core clock speeds of 840 MHz on the GPU, and 1050 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 800 SPUs as well as 40 Texture Address Units and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 6790 should theoretically perform a lot faster than the Radeon HD 3470 256MB in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 6790		134400 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3470 256MB		30400 MB/sec
	Difference: 104000 (342%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6790 should be much (about 950%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 3470 256MB. (explain)

Radeon HD 6790		33600 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3470 256MB		3200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 30400 (950%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 6790 is quite a bit (approximately 320%) more effective at anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 3470 256MB, and also should be able to handle higher resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

Radeon HD 6790		13440 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3470 256MB		3200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 10240 (320%)

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 data (measured in MB per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface within a second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, 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 graphics card could possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.