GeForce GT 420 vs Radeon HD 3470 256MB

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 3470 256MB, which features clock speeds of 800 MHz on the GPU, and 950 MHz on the 256 MB of DDR2 RAM. It features 40(8x5) SPUs along with 4 TAUs and 4 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 3470 256MB should be 6% quicker than the GeForce GT 420 in general, because of its greater bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon HD 3470 256MB		30400 MB/sec
GeForce GT 420		28800 MB/sec
	Difference: 1600 (6%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GT 420 should be much (more or less 75%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 3470 256MB. (explain)

GeForce GT 420		5600 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3470 256MB		3200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 2400 (75%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 3470 256MB is the winner, though not by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 3470 256MB		3200 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GT 420		2800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 400 (14%)

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 largest amount of data (counted in MB per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface in one second. It's worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR RAM, the result 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 anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the the core 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, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.