GeForce GTS 450 vs Radeon HD 3470 256MB

Intro

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

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the GeForce GTS 450 should in theory be a lot better than the Radeon HD 3470 256MB in general. (explain)

GeForce GTS 450		57728 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3470 256MB		30400 MB/sec
	Difference: 27328 (90%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTS 450 will be much (about 683%) more effective at AF than the Radeon HD 3470 256MB. (explain)

GeForce GTS 450		25056 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3470 256MB		3200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 21856 (683%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high screen resolution is important to you, then the GeForce GTS 450 is superior to the Radeon HD 3470 256MB, and very much so. (explain)

GeForce GTS 450		12528 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3470 256MB		3200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 9328 (292%)

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 (measured in MB per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface within a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This is calculated by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the video card will be at handling 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 record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.