Radeon HD 3470 512MB vs Radeon HD 7790

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 7790, which makes use of a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 1000 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM works at a speed of 1500 MHz on this particular card. It features 896 SPUs along with 56 Texture Address Units and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon HD 7790 should theoretically be a lot better than the Radeon HD 3470 512MB overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 7790		96000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3470 512MB		30400 MB/sec
	Difference: 65600 (216%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7790 should be quite a bit (approximately 1650%) more effective at AF than the Radeon HD 3470 512MB. (explain)

Radeon HD 7790		56000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3470 512MB		3200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 52800 (1650%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 7790 is superior to the Radeon HD 3470 512MB, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon HD 7790		16000 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3470 512MB		3200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 12800 (400%)

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 max amount of information (measured in MB per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that are processed in one second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total number of 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 texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the graphics card can possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.