GeForce GT 340 vs Radeon HD 5870

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 5870, which comes with core clock speeds of 850 MHz on the GPU, and 1200 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 1600(320x5) SPUs along with 80 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GT 340		69 Watts
Radeon HD 5870		188 Watts
	Difference: 119 Watts (172%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon HD 5870 should theoretically be a lot superior to the GeForce GT 340 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 5870		153600 MB/sec
GeForce GT 340		54400 MB/sec
	Difference: 99200 (182%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5870 will be a lot (approximately 286%) better at texture filtering than the GeForce GT 340. (explain)

Radeon HD 5870		68000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GT 340		17600 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 50400 (286%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 5870 is quite a bit (approximately 518%) better at AA than the GeForce GT 340, and will be capable of handling higher screen resolutions while still performing well. (explain)

Radeon HD 5870		27200 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GT 340		4400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 22800 (518%)

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 maximum amount of data (counted in MB per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface within a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics chip can possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.