GeForce GTX 460 vs Radeon HD 3470 512MB

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 3470 512MB, which comes with core speeds of 800 MHz on the GPU, and 950 MHz on the 512 MB of GDDR3 RAM. It features 40(8x5) SPUs as well as 4 Texture Address Units and 4 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

The GeForce GTX 460, in theory, should be a lot faster than the Radeon HD 3470 512MB in general. (explain)

GeForce GTX 460		86400 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3470 512MB		30400 MB/sec
	Difference: 56000 (184%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 460 will be quite a bit (about 1081%) more effective at AF than the Radeon HD 3470 512MB. (explain)

GeForce GTX 460		37800 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3470 512MB		3200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 34600 (1081%)

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 460 is a better choice, by far. (explain)

GeForce GTX 460		16200 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3470 512MB		3200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 13000 (406%)

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 across the external memory interface in one second. It's worked out by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics card could possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.