GeForce GTS 150 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) SPUs, 4 TAUs, and 4 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the GeForce GTS 150 should be just a bit faster than the Radeon HD 3470 256MB overall. (explain)

GeForce GTS 150		32000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3470 256MB		30400 MB/sec
	Difference: 1600 (5%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTS 150 is quite a bit (approximately 1380%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 3470 256MB. (explain)

GeForce GTS 150		47360 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3470 256MB		3200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 44160 (1380%)

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the GeForce GTS 150 is a better choice, by a large margin. (explain)

GeForce GTS 150		11840 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3470 256MB		3200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 8640 (270%)

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 maximum amount of information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in a second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher 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 texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the 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 maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of Render Output Units 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 rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.