GeForce GTX 570 vs Radeon HD 3470 512MB

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 3470 512MB, which has 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 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the GeForce GTX 570 should theoretically be much superior to the Radeon HD 3470 512MB in general. (explain)

GeForce GTX 570		152000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3470 512MB		30400 MB/sec
	Difference: 121600 (400%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 570 is a lot (about 1273%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 3470 512MB. (explain)

GeForce GTX 570		43920 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3470 512MB		3200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 40720 (1273%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high resolution is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 570 is the winner, and very much so. (explain)

GeForce GTX 570		29280 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3470 512MB		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 maximum amount of information (in units of MB per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface within a second. It is calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR 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 number is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the card will be at 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 card could possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number 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 fill rate is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.