GeForce GT 310 vs Radeon HD 7770

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 7770, which comes with a core clock frequency of 1000 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1125 MHz. It also features a 128-bit bus, and uses a 28 nm design. It is made up of 640 SPUs, 40 Texture Address Units, 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 7770		80 Watts
	Difference: 49 Watts (158%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 7770 should be 350% quicker than the GeForce GT 310 overall, because of its higher bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon HD 7770		72000 MB/sec
GeForce GT 310		16000 MB/sec
	Difference: 56000 (350%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7770 is a lot (more or less 749%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GT 310. (explain)

Radeon HD 7770		40000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GT 310		4712 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 35288 (749%)

Pixel Rate

If running with lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon HD 7770 is the winner, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 7770		16000 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GT 310		2356 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 13644 (579%)

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 information (counted in MB per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface within a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's memory bandwidth, 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 can be applied per second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the graphics 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 most pixels that the graphics card can possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of colour ROPs 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 fill rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.