Geforce GTX 670 vs Radeon HD 3470 512MB

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 3470 512MB, which features clock speeds of 800 MHz on the GPU, and 950 MHz on the 512 MB of GDDR3 RAM. It features 40(8x5) SPUs as well as 4 Texture Address Units and 4 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Geforce GTX 670 should perform much faster than the Radeon HD 3470 512MB overall. (explain)

Geforce GTX 670		192000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3470 512MB		30400 MB/sec
	Difference: 161600 (532%)

Texel Rate

The Geforce GTX 670 will be quite a bit (more or less 3103%) more effective at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 3470 512MB. (explain)

Geforce GTX 670		102480 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3470 512MB		3200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 99280 (3103%)

Pixel Rate

The Geforce GTX 670 will be quite a bit (more or less 815%) faster with regards to anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 3470 512MB, and also should be able to handle higher screen resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

Geforce GTX 670		29280 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3470 512MB		3200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 26080 (815%)

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 (measured in MB per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface within a second. It is calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units 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 applied in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics card could possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel output rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.