Radeon HD 3470 512MB vs Radeon HD 7770

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 7770, which makes use of a 28 nm design. AMD has set the core frequency at 1000 MHz. The GDDR5 memory is set to run at a speed of 1125 MHz on this particular model. It features 640 SPUs as well as 40 Texture Address Units and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon HD 7770 should theoretically be a lot superior to the Radeon HD 3470 512MB overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 7770		72000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3470 512MB		30400 MB/sec
	Difference: 41600 (137%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7770 will be quite a bit (approximately 1150%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 3470 512MB. (explain)

Radeon HD 7770		40000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3470 512MB		3200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 36800 (1150%)

Pixel Rate

If running with lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon HD 7770 is superior to the Radeon HD 3470 512MB, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon HD 7770		16000 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3470 512MB		3200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 12800 (400%)

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 transported over the external memory interface within a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, 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 can be processed in one second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the video card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics card could possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the clock 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 output rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.