GeForce GTS 150 vs Radeon HD 3470 256MB

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 3470 256MB, which comes with core clock speeds of 800 MHz on the GPU, and 950 MHz on the 256 MB of DDR2 RAM. It features 40(8x5) SPUs as well as 4 Texture Address Units and 4 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

The GeForce GTS 150 should in theory be a small bit faster than the Radeon HD 3470 256MB in general. (explain)

GeForce GTS 150		32000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3470 256MB		30400 MB/sec
	Difference: 1600 (5%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTS 150 is quite a bit (about 1380%) more effective at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 3470 256MB. (explain)

GeForce GTS 150		47360 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3470 256MB		3200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 44160 (1380%)

Pixel Rate

If using lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the GeForce GTS 150 is the winner, by a large margin. (explain)

GeForce GTS 150		11840 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3470 256MB		3200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 8640 (270%)

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 largest amount of data (counted in MB per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface in one second. It is calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the video card can possibly write to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.