GeForce GTX 550 Ti vs Radeon HD 3470 256MB

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 3470 256MB, which makes use of a 55 nm design. AMD has set the core speed at 800 MHz. The DDR2 RAM works at a speed of 950 MHz on this specific card. It features 40(8x5) SPUs along with 4 Texture Address Units and 4 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

The GeForce GTX 550 Ti should theoretically be much faster than the Radeon HD 3470 256MB in general. (explain)

GeForce GTX 550 Ti		98496 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3470 256MB		30400 MB/sec
	Difference: 68096 (224%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 550 Ti is a lot (more or less 800%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 3470 256MB. (explain)

GeForce GTX 550 Ti		28800 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3470 256MB		3200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 25600 (800%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high screen resolution is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 550 Ti is superior to the Radeon HD 3470 256MB, by far. (explain)

GeForce GTX 550 Ti		21600 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3470 256MB		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: Bandwidth is the largest amount of information (counted in MB per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in one second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the video card can possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel fill rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.