GeForce GT 440 1.5GB vs Radeon HD 3470 512MB

Intro

The GeForce GT 440 1.5GB makes use of a 40 nm design. nVidia has clocked the core frequency at 594 MHz. The GDDR3 memory is set to run at a frequency of 900 MHz on this model. It features 144 SPUs along with 24 Texture Address Units and 24 Rasterization Operator Units.

Compare that to the Radeon HD 3470 512MB, which makes use of a 55 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 800 MHz. The GDDR3 RAM works at a speed of 950 MHz on this specific card. It features 40(8x5) SPUs as well as 4 TAUs and 4 Rasterization Operator Units.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the max amount of information (measured in MB per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface within a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per 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 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 a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics card could possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the clock 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 fill rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.