GeForce GT 310 vs Radeon HD 7970

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 7970, which uses a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 925 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM works at a frequency of 1375 MHz on this specific card. It features 2048 SPUs along with 128 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GT 310		31 Watts
Radeon HD 7970		250 Watts
	Difference: 219 Watts (706%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon HD 7970 should in theory be a lot superior to the GeForce GT 310 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		264000 MB/sec
GeForce GT 310		16000 MB/sec
	Difference: 248000 (1550%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7970 will be much (about 2413%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GT 310. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		118400 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GT 310		4712 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 113688 (2413%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 7970 is a lot (more or less 1156%) faster with regards to AA than the GeForce GT 310, and also should be able to handle higher resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		29600 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GT 310		2356 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 27244 (1156%)

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 data (in units of MB per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in one second. The number is worked out by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the graphics card could possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate also depends on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.