Radeon HD 3470 256MB vs Radeon HD 3690/3830

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 3690/3830, which has clock speeds of 668 MHz on the GPU, and 828 MHz on the 256 MB of GDDR3 memory. It features 320(64x5) SPUs along with 16 Texture Address Units and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 3470 256MB should be a small bit faster than the Radeon HD 3690/3830 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 3470 256MB		30400 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3690/3830		26496 MB/sec
	Difference: 3904 (15%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 3690/3830 is a lot (more or less 234%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 3470 256MB. (explain)

Radeon HD 3690/3830		10688 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3470 256MB		3200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 7488 (234%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 3690/3830 is the winner, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon HD 3690/3830		10688 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3470 256MB		3200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 7488 (234%)

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 moved across the external memory interface within a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are processed in one second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the graphics card could possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel fill rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.