GeForce GT 310 vs Radeon HD 7870

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 7870, which features GPU core speed of 1000 MHz, and 2048 MB of GDDR5 memory set to run at 1200 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is comprised of 1280 Stream Processors, 80 Texture Address Units, and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GT 310		31 Watts
Radeon HD 7870		175 Watts
	Difference: 144 Watts (465%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 7870 will be 860% faster than the GeForce GT 310 overall, because of its higher data rate. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870		153600 MB/sec
GeForce GT 310		16000 MB/sec
	Difference: 137600 (860%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7870 is a lot (more or less 1598%) more effective at texture filtering than the GeForce GT 310. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870		80000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GT 310		4712 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 75288 (1598%)

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 7870 is superior to the GeForce GT 310, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870		32000 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GT 310		2356 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 29644 (1258%)

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 largest amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in a second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are processed in one second. This figure is calculated 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 video card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card can possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.