GeForce GTX 550 Ti vs Radeon HD 3470 512MB

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 3470 512MB, which features a core clock speed of 800 MHz and a GDDR3 memory frequency of 950 MHz. It also makes use of a 128-bit bus, and uses a 55 nm design. It is made up of 40(8x5) SPUs, 4 Texture Address Units, and 4 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the GeForce GTX 550 Ti will be 224% quicker than the Radeon HD 3470 512MB in general, due to its greater data rate. (explain)

GeForce GTX 550 Ti		98496 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3470 512MB		30400 MB/sec
	Difference: 68096 (224%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 550 Ti is a lot (approximately 800%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 3470 512MB. (explain)

GeForce GTX 550 Ti		28800 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3470 512MB		3200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 25600 (800%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high screen resolution is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 550 Ti is a better choice, by a large margin. (explain)

GeForce GTX 550 Ti		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 max amount of information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in one second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the faster 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 can be applied in one second. This is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, 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 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 amount of colour ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.