Radeon HD 3470 256MB vs Radeon R9 M275X

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon R9 M275X, which uses a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 900 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM works at a speed of 1125 MHz on this specific card. It features 640 SPUs along with 40 TAUs and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon R9 M275X should in theory perform much faster than the Radeon HD 3470 256MB in general. (explain)

Radeon R9 M275X		72000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3470 256MB		30400 MB/sec
	Difference: 41600 (137%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 M275X is quite a bit (about 1025%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the Radeon HD 3470 256MB. (explain)

Radeon R9 M275X		36000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3470 256MB		3200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 32800 (1025%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon R9 M275X is superior to the Radeon HD 3470 256MB, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon R9 M275X		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: Bandwidth is the largest amount of information (measured in MB per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface within a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are processed in one second. This is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the video card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in a second.

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