GeForce GT 340 vs Radeon HD 3850 256MB

Intro

The GeForce GT 340 makes use of a 40 nm design. nVidia has clocked the core speed at 550 MHz. The GDDR5 memory is set to run at a frequency of 850 MHz on this particular model. It features 96 SPUs along with 32 Texture Address Units and 8 Rasterization Operator Units.

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 3850 256MB, which comes with a core clock speed of 668 MHz and a GDDR3 memory speed of 828 MHz. It also features a 256-bit memory bus, and makes use of a 55 nm design. It is comprised of 320(64x5) SPUs, 16 TAUs, and 16 ROPs.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the max amount of data (counted in MB per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface within a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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

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