GeForce GT 340 1GB vs Radeon HD 7850

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 7850, which features GPU clock speed of 860 MHz, and 2048 MB of GDDR5 RAM running at 1200 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is made up of 1024 Stream Processors, 64 Texture Address Units, and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GT 340 1GB		69 Watts
Radeon HD 7850		130 Watts
	Difference: 61 Watts (88%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon HD 7850 should in theory be much superior to the GeForce GT 340 1GB overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 7850		153600 MB/sec
GeForce GT 340 1GB		54400 MB/sec
	Difference: 99200 (182%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7850 is a lot (about 213%) more effective at AF than the GeForce GT 340 1GB. (explain)

Radeon HD 7850		55040 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GT 340 1GB		17600 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 37440 (213%)

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 7850 is superior to the GeForce GT 340 1GB, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 7850		27520 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GT 340 1GB		4400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 23120 (525%)

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: Memory bandwidth is the maximum amount of data (in units of MB per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics card can possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.