GeForce GT 310 vs Radeon HD 7950

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 7950, which makes use of a 28 nm design. AMD has set the core speed at 800 MHz. The GDDR5 memory is set to run at a speed of 1250 MHz on this particular model. It features 1792 SPUs along with 112 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GT 310		31 Watts
Radeon HD 7950		200 Watts
	Difference: 169 Watts (545%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 7950 is 1400% quicker than the GeForce GT 310 in general, because of its higher bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon HD 7950		240000 MB/sec
GeForce GT 310		16000 MB/sec
	Difference: 224000 (1400%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7950 should be quite a bit (about 1802%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GT 310. (explain)

Radeon HD 7950		89600 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GT 310		4712 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 84888 (1802%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 7950 is the winner, by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 7950		25600 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GT 310		2356 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 23244 (987%)

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 largest amount of information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface within a second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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

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