Radeon HD 3470 512MB vs Radeon R7 260X

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon R7 260X, which comes with clock speeds of 1100 MHz on the GPU, and 1625 MHz on the 2048 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 896 SPUs as well as 56 Texture Address Units and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon R7 260X is 242% quicker than the Radeon HD 3470 512MB overall, because of its higher bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon R7 260X		104000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3470 512MB		30400 MB/sec
	Difference: 73600 (242%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R7 260X should be much (approximately 1825%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 3470 512MB. (explain)

Radeon R7 260X		61600 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3470 512MB		3200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 58400 (1825%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R7 260X will be quite a bit (more or less 450%) faster with regards to full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 3470 512MB, and also will be able to handle higher screen resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

Radeon R7 260X		17600 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3470 512MB		3200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 14400 (450%)

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 (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in one second. The number is calculated by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better this number, 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 amount of pixels that the graphics card can possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.