Radeon HD 3470 256MB vs Radeon R7 240

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon R7 240, which comes with a clock speed of 730 MHz and a DDR3 memory speed of 900 MHz. It also features a 128-bit bus, and makes use of a 28 nm design. It is made up of 320 SPUs, 20 Texture Address Units, and 8 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the Radeon HD 3470 256MB should be just a bit faster than the Radeon R7 240 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 3470 256MB		30400 MB/sec
Radeon R7 240		28800 MB/sec
	Difference: 1600 (6%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R7 240 should be quite a bit (approximately 356%) better at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 3470 256MB. (explain)

Radeon R7 240		14600 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3470 256MB		3200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 11400 (356%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon R7 240 is the winner, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon R7 240		5840 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3470 256MB		3200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 2640 (83%)

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 (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card 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 per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the graphics card could possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.