GeForce GTS 150 vs Radeon HD 3470 512MB

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 3470 512MB, which has a GPU core clock speed of 800 MHz, and 512 MB of GDDR3 memory set to run at 950 MHz through a 128-bit bus. It also is made up of 40(8x5) SPUs, 4 Texture Address Units, and 4 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

The GeForce GTS 150 should in theory be a little bit faster than the Radeon HD 3470 512MB overall. (explain)

GeForce GTS 150		32000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3470 512MB		30400 MB/sec
	Difference: 1600 (5%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTS 150 is much (more or less 1380%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the Radeon HD 3470 512MB. (explain)

GeForce GTS 150		47360 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3470 512MB		3200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 44160 (1380%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTS 150 will be much (about 270%) better at full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 3470 512MB, and should be capable of handling higher screen resolutions more effectively. (explain)

GeForce GTS 150		11840 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3470 512MB		3200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 8640 (270%)

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 (counted in MB per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better 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 are applied per second. This is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics 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 - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.