GeForce GT 320 vs Radeon HD 3470 512MB

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 3470 512MB, which comes with GPU 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) Stream Processors, 4 Texture Address Units, and 4 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon HD 3470 512MB should in theory be a small bit better than the GeForce GT 320 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 3470 512MB		30400 MB/sec
GeForce GT 320		25280 MB/sec
	Difference: 5120 (20%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GT 320 is quite a bit (more or less 305%) better at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 3470 512MB. (explain)

GeForce GT 320		12960 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3470 512MB		3200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 9760 (305%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GT 320 is a lot (more or less 35%) more effective at full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 3470 512MB, and also should be capable of handling higher resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

GeForce GT 320		4320 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3470 512MB		3200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 1120 (35%)

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 data (measured in MB per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface within a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum 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 better the texel rate, the better the graphics 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 could possibly write to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel fill rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.