GeForce GTX 570 vs Radeon HD 3470 256MB

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 3470 256MB, which comes with a GPU core clock speed of 800 MHz, and 256 MB of DDR2 RAM running at 950 MHz through a 128-bit bus. It also is made up of 40(8x5) Stream Processors, 4 TAUs, and 4 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the GeForce GTX 570 should perform much faster than the Radeon HD 3470 256MB in general. (explain)

GeForce GTX 570		152000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3470 256MB		30400 MB/sec
	Difference: 121600 (400%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 570 will be a lot (more or less 1273%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 3470 256MB. (explain)

GeForce GTX 570		43920 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3470 256MB		3200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 40720 (1273%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 570 will be much (approximately 815%) better at FSAA than the Radeon HD 3470 256MB, and will be able to handle higher screen resolutions while still performing well. (explain)

GeForce GTX 570		29280 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3470 256MB		3200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 26080 (815%)

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 (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in a second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

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

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