GeForce GT 310 vs Radeon HD 6790

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 6790, which comes with clock speeds of 840 MHz on the GPU, and 1050 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 800 SPUs as well as 40 TAUs and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GT 310		31 Watts
Radeon HD 6790		150 Watts
	Difference: 119 Watts (384%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 6790 should in theory perform much faster than the GeForce GT 310 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 6790		134400 MB/sec
GeForce GT 310		16000 MB/sec
	Difference: 118400 (740%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6790 should be quite a bit (approximately 613%) better at texture filtering than the GeForce GT 310. (explain)

Radeon HD 6790		33600 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GT 310		4712 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 28888 (613%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6790 is superior to the GeForce GT 310, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon HD 6790		13440 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GT 310		2356 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 11084 (470%)

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 data (in units of MB per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in a second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics card could possibly record to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the core speed of the card. 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 output rate is also dependant on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.