GeForce GT 220 GDDR3 vs Radeon HD 3470 256MB

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 3470 256MB, which has GPU core speed of 800 MHz, and 256 MB of DDR2 RAM running at 950 MHz through a 128-bit bus. It also is made up of 40(8x5) Stream Processors, 4 TAUs, and 4 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

The GeForce GT 220 GDDR3 should theoretically be a little bit faster than the Radeon HD 3470 256MB in general. (explain)

GeForce GT 220 GDDR3		32384 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3470 256MB		30400 MB/sec
	Difference: 1984 (7%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GT 220 GDDR3 should be much (approximately 213%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the Radeon HD 3470 256MB. (explain)

GeForce GT 220 GDDR3		10000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3470 256MB		3200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 6800 (213%)

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the GeForce GT 220 GDDR3 is a better choice, by a large margin. (explain)

GeForce GT 220 GDDR3		5000 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3470 256MB		3200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 1800 (56%)

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 largest amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface within a second. It is worked out by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This is worked out by multiplying the total texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher 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 one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip can possibly write to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.