GeForce 830M vs Radeon HD 3470 512MB

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 3470 512MB, which has core clock 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 TAUs and 4 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 3470 512MB should be 111% faster than the GeForce 830M in general, due to its higher bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon HD 3470 512MB		30400 MB/sec
GeForce 830M		14400 MB/sec
	Difference: 16000 (111%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce 830M will be a lot (approximately 415%) more effective at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 3470 512MB. (explain)

GeForce 830M		16464 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3470 512MB		3200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 13264 (415%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the GeForce 830M is superior to the Radeon HD 3470 512MB, by far. (explain)

GeForce 830M		8232 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3470 512MB		3200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 5032 (157%)

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 data (measured in MB per second) that can be moved 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 RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the 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 that the graphics card can possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.