GeForce GTX 460 (OEM) vs Radeon HD 3470 512MB

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 3470 512MB, which comes with clock speeds of 800 MHz on the GPU, and 950 MHz on the 512 MB of GDDR3 RAM. It features 40(8x5) SPUs along with 4 TAUs and 4 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the GeForce GTX 460 (OEM) should be 258% quicker than the Radeon HD 3470 512MB in general, because of its greater bandwidth. (explain)

GeForce GTX 460 (OEM)		108800 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3470 512MB		30400 MB/sec
	Difference: 78400 (258%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 460 (OEM) should be a lot (about 1038%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 3470 512MB. (explain)

GeForce GTX 460 (OEM)		36400 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3470 512MB		3200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 33200 (1038%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 460 (OEM) is a better choice, by a large margin. (explain)

GeForce GTX 460 (OEM)		20800 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3470 512MB		3200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 17600 (550%)

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 max amount of information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface within a second. It's calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the graphics 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 the graphics card can possibly write to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.