Radeon HD 3470 256MB vs Radeon HD 4670 512MB

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 4670 512MB, which comes with clock speeds of 750 MHz on the GPU, and 1000 MHz on the 512 MB of GDDR4/GDDR3/DDR3/DDR2 RAM. It features 320(64x5) SPUs as well as 32 Texture Address Units and 8 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 4670 512MB, in theory, should perform just a bit faster than the Radeon HD 3470 256MB overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 4670 512MB		32000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3470 256MB		30400 MB/sec
	Difference: 1600 (5%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 4670 512MB will be quite a bit (about 650%) better at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 3470 256MB. (explain)

Radeon HD 4670 512MB		24000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3470 256MB		3200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 20800 (650%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 4670 512MB is the winner, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon HD 4670 512MB		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: Bandwidth is the max amount of information (counted in MB per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card 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 applied in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the graphics card can possibly record 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 clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.