GeForce GTX 980M vs Radeon HD 3470 512MB

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 3470 512MB, which features core speeds of 800 MHz on the GPU, and 950 MHz on the 512 MB of GDDR3 RAM. It features 40(8x5) SPUs as well as 4 Texture Address Units and 4 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the GeForce GTX 980M should perform quite a bit faster than the Radeon HD 3470 512MB overall. (explain)

GeForce GTX 980M		128000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3470 512MB		30400 MB/sec
	Difference: 97600 (321%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 980M should be much (about 3014%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the Radeon HD 3470 512MB. (explain)

GeForce GTX 980M		99648 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3470 512MB		3200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 96448 (3014%)

Pixel Rate

If running with lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 980M is the winner, and very much so. (explain)

GeForce GTX 980M		66432 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3470 512MB		3200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 63232 (1976%)

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 (counted in megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be processed in one second. This is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the graphics card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card can possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.