GeForce GTX 660 vs Radeon HD 3470 256MB

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 3470 256MB, which has a clock frequency of 800 MHz and a DDR2 memory frequency of 950 MHz. It also uses a 128-bit memory bus, and makes use of a 55 nm design. It features 40(8x5) SPUs, 4 Texture Address Units, and 4 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

The GeForce GTX 660 should in theory be much faster than the Radeon HD 3470 256MB in general. (explain)

GeForce GTX 660		144192 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3470 256MB		30400 MB/sec
	Difference: 113792 (374%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 660 is quite a bit (about 2350%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the Radeon HD 3470 256MB. (explain)

GeForce GTX 660		78400 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3470 256MB		3200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 75200 (2350%)

Pixel Rate

If using lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 660 is the winner, by a large margin. (explain)

GeForce GTX 660		23520 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3470 256MB		3200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 20320 (635%)

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 (counted in megabytes per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in one second. It is calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher this number, 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 maximum number of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.