GeForce GT 340 1GB vs Radeon HD 4770

Intro

The GeForce GT 340 1GB uses a 40 nm design. nVidia has set the core frequency at 550 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM is set to run at a speed of 850 MHz on this specific card. It features 96 SPUs as well as 32 Texture Address Units and 8 ROPs.

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 4770, which has a clock speed of 750 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 800 MHz. It also features a 128-bit bus, and uses a 40 nm design. It features 640(128x5) SPUs, 32 TAUs, and 16 ROPs.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the max amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface in one second. The number is worked out by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. 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 processed in one second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the video 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 maximum number of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the core speed of the card. 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 lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.