Radeon HD 3470 256MB vs Radeon HD 4670 1GB

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 4670 1GB, which comes with core speeds of 750 MHz on the GPU, and 1100 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR4/GDDR3/DDR3/DDR2 RAM. It features 320(64x5) SPUs along with 32 Texture Address Units and 8 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 4670 1GB should be 16% faster than the Radeon HD 3470 256MB overall, due to its greater bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon HD 4670 1GB		35200 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3470 256MB		30400 MB/sec
	Difference: 4800 (16%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 4670 1GB will be quite a bit (about 650%) better at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 3470 256MB. (explain)

Radeon HD 4670 1GB		24000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3470 256MB		3200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 20800 (650%)

Pixel Rate

If running with lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon HD 4670 1GB is superior to the Radeon HD 3470 256MB, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 4670 1GB		6000 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3470 256MB		3200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 2800 (88%)

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 max amount of information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher 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 applied in one second. This is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the video card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card could possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.