GeForce 830M vs Radeon HD 3470 512MB

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 3470 512MB, which has clock speeds of 800 MHz on the GPU, and 950 MHz on the 512 MB of GDDR3 RAM. It features 40(8x5) SPUs along with 4 TAUs and 4 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 3470 512MB should be much faster than the GeForce 830M overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 3470 512MB		30400 MB/sec
GeForce 830M		14400 MB/sec
	Difference: 16000 (111%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce 830M is quite a bit (about 415%) more effective at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 3470 512MB. (explain)

GeForce 830M		16464 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3470 512MB		3200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 13264 (415%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the GeForce 830M is a better choice, by far. (explain)

GeForce 830M		8232 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3470 512MB		3200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 5032 (157%)

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 max amount of information (counted in MB per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface in one second. It is worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip can possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of 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 fill rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.