GeForce GT 310 vs Radeon HD 7990

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 7990, which features GPU clock speed of 950 MHz, and 3072 MB of GDDR5 RAM running at 1500 MHz through a 384-bit bus. It also features 2048 SPUs, 128 TAUs, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

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

Performance-wise, the Radeon HD 7990 should theoretically be a lot better 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 is quite a bit (more or less 5061%) faster with regards to AF than the GeForce GT 310. (explain)

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

Pixel Rate

If using lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon HD 7990 is the winner, by a large margin. (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: Bandwidth is the largest amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface within a second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR memory, it must 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 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 clock 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 in one second.

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