GeForce GTX 660 vs Radeon HD 3470 256MB

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 3470 256MB, which comes with core speeds of 800 MHz on the GPU, and 950 MHz on the 256 MB of DDR2 RAM. It features 40(8x5) SPUs along with 4 TAUs and 4 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

The GeForce GTX 660 should in theory be a lot 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 will be much (approximately 2350%) better at anisotropic 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

The GeForce GTX 660 should be much (about 635%) faster with regards to AA than the Radeon HD 3470 256MB, and also will be able to handle higher screen resolutions without losing too much performance. (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 largest amount of information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in one second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses 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 number of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the graphics card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card could possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.