GeForce GTS 450 vs Radeon HD 3470 256MB

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 3470 256MB, which comes with GPU clock speed of 800 MHz, and 256 MB of DDR2 RAM set to run at 950 MHz through a 128-bit bus. It also features 40(8x5) Stream Processors, 4 TAUs, and 4 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the GeForce GTS 450 should in theory be quite a bit superior to the Radeon HD 3470 256MB in general. (explain)

GeForce GTS 450		57728 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3470 256MB		30400 MB/sec
	Difference: 27328 (90%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTS 450 is quite a bit (approximately 683%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 3470 256MB. (explain)

GeForce GTS 450		25056 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3470 256MB		3200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 21856 (683%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTS 450 is much (more or less 292%) better at AA than the Radeon HD 3470 256MB, and able to handle higher resolutions while still performing well. (explain)

GeForce GTS 450		12528 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3470 256MB		3200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 9328 (292%)

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 largest amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface within a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, 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 amount of pixels the video card can possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.