Radeon HD 3470 256MB vs Radeon HD 7990

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 7990, which features a core clock frequency of 950 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1500 MHz. It also features a 384-bit memory bus, and uses a 28 nm design. It is comprised of 2048 SPUs, 128 TAUs, and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the Radeon HD 7990 should be a lot faster 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 much (more or less 7500%) better at 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 high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 7990 is the winner, and very much so. (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 (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface within a second. It's worked out by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total number 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 per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card could possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.