GeForce GT 340 vs Radeon HD 7870 XT

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 7870 XT, which comes with a GPU core clock speed of 925 MHz, and 2048 MB of GDDR5 RAM running at 1500 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also features 1536 SPUs, 96 Texture Address Units, and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GT 340		69 Watts
Radeon HD 7870 XT		185 Watts
	Difference: 116 Watts (168%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 7870 XT, in theory, should be much faster than the GeForce GT 340 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870 XT		192000 MB/sec
GeForce GT 340		54400 MB/sec
	Difference: 137600 (253%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7870 XT is quite a bit (approximately 405%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GT 340. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870 XT		88800 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GT 340		17600 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 71200 (405%)

Pixel Rate

If running with lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon HD 7870 XT is a better choice, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870 XT		29600 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GT 340		4400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 25200 (573%)

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: Bandwidth is the maximum amount of information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface within a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the video card could possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel fill rate also depends on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.