Radeon HD 3470 512MB vs Radeon HD 7990

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 7990, which uses a 28 nm design. AMD has set the core speed at 950 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM runs at a speed of 1500 MHz on this card. It features 2048 SPUs along with 128 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon HD 7990 should theoretically be much superior to 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 (about 7500%) faster with regards to 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 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 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 largest amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in a second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, 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 can be processed per second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the 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 can possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the card's clock speed. 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 is also dependant on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.