Radeon HD 3470 256MB vs Radeon HD 7990

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 7990, which makes use of a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 950 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM runs at a speed of 1500 MHz on this particular card. It features 2048 SPUs along with 128 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon HD 7990 should in theory be a lot better than the Radeon HD 3470 256MB overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 7990		576000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3470 256MB		30400 MB/sec
	Difference: 545600 (1795%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7990 will be a lot (more or less 7500%) faster with regards to AF than the Radeon HD 3470 256MB. (explain)

Radeon HD 7990		243200 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3470 256MB		3200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 240000 (7500%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 7990 is superior to the Radeon HD 3470 256MB, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 7990		60800 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3470 256MB		3200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 57600 (1800%)

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.

One or more cards in this comparison are multi-core. This means that their bandwidth, texel and pixel rates are theoretically doubled - this does not mean the card will actually perform twice as fast, but only that it should in theory be able to. Actual game benchmarks will give a more accurate idea of what it's capable of.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the maximum amount of data (counted in MB per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the graphics card could possibly record to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.