Radeon HD 3470 512MB vs Radeon HD 7990

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 7990, which features core clock speeds of 950 MHz on the GPU, and 1500 MHz on the 3072 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 2048 SPUs as well as 128 TAUs and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon HD 7990 should theoretically be a lot better than the Radeon HD 3470 512MB in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 7990		576000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3470 512MB		30400 MB/sec
	Difference: 545600 (1795%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7990 will be a lot (more or less 7500%) better at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 3470 512MB. (explain)

Radeon HD 7990		243200 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3470 512MB		3200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 240000 (7500%)

Pixel Rate

If using lots of anti-aliasing 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 512MB		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 max amount of information (in units of MB per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface within a second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the memory bandwidth, the faster 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 are applied per second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the card will be at handling 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 graphics card could possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.