GeForce GTX 460 1GB vs Radeon HD 3470 512MB

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 3470 512MB, which uses a 55 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 800 MHz. The GDDR3 RAM runs at a speed of 950 MHz on this model. It features 40(8x5) SPUs along with 4 Texture Address Units and 4 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the GeForce GTX 460 1GB should in theory be a lot better than the Radeon HD 3470 512MB overall. (explain)

GeForce GTX 460 1GB		115200 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3470 512MB		30400 MB/sec
	Difference: 84800 (279%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 460 1GB will be much (approximately 1081%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 3470 512MB. (explain)

GeForce GTX 460 1GB		37800 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3470 512MB		3200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 34600 (1081%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 460 1GB will be a lot (approximately 575%) more effective at FSAA than the Radeon HD 3470 512MB, and able to handle higher resolutions more effectively. (explain)

GeForce GTX 460 1GB		21600 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3470 512MB		3200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 18400 (575%)

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: Memory bandwidth is the maximum amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in one second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the video 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 number of pixels the video card could possibly write to its local memory in one 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 - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.