GeForce GT 340 vs Radeon HD 5570

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 5570, which uses a 40 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 650 MHz. The DDR3 RAM works at a frequency of 900 MHz on this model. It features 400(80x5) SPUs as well as 20 Texture Address Units and 8 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 5570		43 Watts
GeForce GT 340		69 Watts
	Difference: 26 Watts (60%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the GeForce GT 340 should perform much faster than the Radeon HD 5570 overall. (explain)

GeForce GT 340		54400 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5570		28800 MB/sec
	Difference: 25600 (89%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GT 340 will be much (more or less 35%) more effective at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 5570. (explain)

GeForce GT 340		17600 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5570		13000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 4600 (35%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 5570 is superior to the GeForce GT 340, not by a very large margin though. (explain)

Radeon HD 5570		5200 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GT 340		4400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 800 (18%)

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 largest amount of information (measured in MB per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface within a second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

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

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