Radeon HD 3470 512MB vs Radeon HD 6970

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 6970, which uses a 40 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 880 MHz. The GDDR5 memory runs at a frequency of 1375 MHz on this specific model. It features 1536 SPUs along with 96 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 6970, in theory, should perform much faster than the Radeon HD 3470 512MB in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		176000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3470 512MB		30400 MB/sec
	Difference: 145600 (479%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6970 is a lot (about 2540%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 3470 512MB. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		84480 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3470 512MB		3200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 81280 (2540%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6970 is superior to the Radeon HD 3470 512MB, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		28160 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3470 512MB		3200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 24960 (780%)

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 maximum amount of information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface in a second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card could possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.