GeForce 9800 GTX vs Radeon HD 3470 512MB

Intro

The GeForce 9800 GTX uses a 65 nm design. nVidia has set the core frequency at 675 MHz. The GDDR3 memory is set to run at a frequency of 1100 MHz on this model. It features 128 SPUs along with 64 TAUs and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 3470 512MB, which has core clock speeds of 800 MHz on the GPU, and 950 MHz on the 512 MB of GDDR3 RAM. It features 40(8x5) SPUs as well as 4 Texture Address Units and 4 ROPs.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the max amount of data (in units of MB per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface within a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that are processed in one second. This is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core 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 applied per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly record to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated 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 many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.