GeForce GT 320 vs Radeon HD 3470 512MB

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 3470 512MB, which makes use of a 55 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 800 MHz. The GDDR3 memory is set to run at a speed of 950 MHz on this model. It features 40(8x5) SPUs along with 4 Texture Address Units and 4 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 3470 512MB will be 20% quicker than the GeForce GT 320 overall, due to its higher bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon HD 3470 512MB		30400 MB/sec
GeForce GT 320		25280 MB/sec
	Difference: 5120 (20%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GT 320 should be quite a bit (approximately 305%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 3470 512MB. (explain)

GeForce GT 320		12960 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3470 512MB		3200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 9760 (305%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high screen resolution is important to you, then the GeForce GT 320 is a better choice, and very much so. (explain)

GeForce GT 320		4320 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3470 512MB		3200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 1120 (35%)

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 (measured in MB per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in one second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This number is worked out 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 maximum number of pixels that the graphics card could 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 colour ROPs 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 rate also depends on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.