Radeon HD 3470 256MB vs Radeon HD 5570

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 5570, which features a GPU core clock speed of 650 MHz, and 512 MB of DDR3 RAM set to run at 900 MHz through a 128-bit bus. It also is made up of 400(80x5) SPUs, 20 Texture Address Units, and 8 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon HD 3470 256MB should in theory be a small bit superior to the Radeon HD 5570 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 3470 256MB		30400 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5570		28800 MB/sec
	Difference: 1600 (6%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5570 should be much (about 306%) faster with regards to AF than the Radeon HD 3470 256MB. (explain)

Radeon HD 5570		13000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3470 256MB		3200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 9800 (306%)

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 5570 is superior to the Radeon HD 3470 256MB, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 5570		5200 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3470 256MB		3200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 2000 (63%)

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: Memory bandwidth is the largest amount of data (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR type memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed in one second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units 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 amount of pixels the video card can possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.