Radeon HD 3470 512MB vs Radeon HD 3690/3830

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 3690/3830, which comes with clock speeds of 668 MHz on the GPU, and 828 MHz on the 256 MB of GDDR3 memory. It features 320(64x5) SPUs as well as 16 Texture Address Units and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 3470 512MB should be a bit faster than the Radeon HD 3690/3830 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 3470 512MB		30400 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3690/3830		26496 MB/sec
	Difference: 3904 (15%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 3690/3830 is much (approximately 234%) more effective at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 3470 512MB. (explain)

Radeon HD 3690/3830		10688 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3470 512MB		3200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 7488 (234%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 3690/3830 will be much (more or less 234%) more effective at anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 3470 512MB, and also should be able to handle higher screen resolutions more effectively. (explain)

Radeon HD 3690/3830		10688 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3470 512MB		3200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 7488 (234%)

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 maximum amount of data (in units of MB per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface within a second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the bandwidth is, the better 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the video card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the video card could possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.