GeForce GT 320 vs Radeon HD 3470 256MB

Intro

The GeForce GT 320 makes use of a 40 nm design. nVidia has set the core frequency at 540 MHz. The GDDR3 memory is set to run at a frequency of 790 MHz on this particular model. It features 72 SPUs as well as 24 Texture Address Units and 8 Rasterization Operator Units.

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 3470 256MB, which has GPU clock 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 Raster Operation Units.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the maximum amount of information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in one second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the bandwidth is, 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 can be applied per second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the graphics card will be at 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 the video card could possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.