GeForce GT 340 1GB vs Radeon HD 5970

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 5970, which makes use of a 40 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 725 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM runs at a speed of 1000 MHz on this specific card. It features 1600 SPUs along with 160 Texture Address Units and 64 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GT 340 1GB		69 Watts
Radeon HD 5970		294 Watts
	Difference: 225 Watts (326%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 5970 should be a lot faster than the GeForce GT 340 1GB in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		256000 MB/sec
GeForce GT 340 1GB		54400 MB/sec
	Difference: 201600 (371%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5970 will be a lot (more or less 1218%) more effective at AF than the GeForce GT 340 1GB. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		232000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GT 340 1GB		17600 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 214400 (1218%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 5970 will be much (approximately 2009%) better at anti-aliasing than the GeForce GT 340 1GB, and also will be capable of handling higher screen resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		92800 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GT 340 1GB		4400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 88400 (2009%)

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.

One or more cards in this comparison are multi-core. This means that their bandwidth, texel and pixel rates are theoretically doubled - this does not mean the card will actually perform twice as fast, but only that it should in theory be able to. Actual game benchmarks will give a more accurate idea of what it's capable of.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the largest amount of data (measured in MB per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface in one second. It's calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses 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, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that are processed in one second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card 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 in a 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. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.