GeForce GT 310 vs Radeon HD 7990

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 7990, which has GPU clock speed of 950 MHz, and 3072 MB of GDDR5 RAM set to run at 1500 MHz through a 384-bit bus. It also is made up of 2048 SPUs, 128 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 7990		375 Watts
	Difference: 344 Watts (1110%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 7990 should theoretically be quite a bit faster than the GeForce GT 310 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 7990		576000 MB/sec
GeForce GT 310		16000 MB/sec
	Difference: 560000 (3500%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7990 should be a lot (about 5061%) more effective at AF than the GeForce GT 310. (explain)

Radeon HD 7990		243200 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GT 310		4712 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 238488 (5061%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 7990 will be a lot (about 2481%) better at anti-aliasing than the GeForce GT 310, and also should be able to handle higher resolutions more effectively. (explain)

Radeon HD 7990		60800 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GT 310		2356 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 58444 (2481%)

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.

One or more cards in this comparison are multi-core. This means that their bandwidth, texel and pixel rates are theoretically doubled - this does not mean the card will actually perform twice as fast, but only that it should in theory be able to. Actual game benchmarks will give a more accurate idea of what it's capable of.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the largest amount of information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in one second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly write to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.