GeForce GT 640 DDR3 vs Radeon HD 3470 256MB

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 3470 256MB, which features GPU clock speed of 800 MHz, and 256 MB of DDR2 RAM set to run at 950 MHz through a 128-bit bus. It also is made up of 40(8x5) Stream Processors, 4 Texture Address Units, and 4 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the GeForce GT 640 DDR3 should perform a lot faster than the Radeon HD 3470 256MB overall. (explain)

GeForce GT 640 DDR3		57024 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3470 256MB		30400 MB/sec
	Difference: 26624 (88%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GT 640 DDR3 is a lot (approximately 800%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 3470 256MB. (explain)

GeForce GT 640 DDR3		28800 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3470 256MB		3200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 25600 (800%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the GeForce GT 640 DDR3 is the winner, by far. (explain)

GeForce GT 640 DDR3		14400 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3470 256MB		3200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 11200 (350%)

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 maximum amount of information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. 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 applied in one second. This is worked out by multiplying the total texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the graphics card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the graphics card could possibly record to the 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 clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.