Radeon HD 3470 512MB vs Radeon HD 5570

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 5570, which features core clock speeds of 650 MHz on the GPU, and 900 MHz on the 512 MB of DDR3 RAM. It features 400(80x5) SPUs as well as 20 Texture Address Units and 8 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 3470 512MB is 6% faster than the Radeon HD 5570 overall, due to its higher bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon HD 3470 512MB		30400 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5570		28800 MB/sec
	Difference: 1600 (6%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5570 is a lot (approximately 306%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 3470 512MB. (explain)

Radeon HD 5570		13000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3470 512MB		3200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 9800 (306%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 5570 is much (more or less 63%) better at AA than the Radeon HD 3470 512MB, and also capable of handling higher screen resolutions better. (explain)

Radeon HD 5570		5200 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3470 512MB		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: Bandwidth is the largest amount of data (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics card could possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel fill rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.