GeForce GT 310 vs Radeon HD 7990

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 7990, which features a core clock speed of 950 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1500 MHz. It also features a 384-bit memory bus, and uses a 28 nm design. It features 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

As far as performance goes, the Radeon HD 7990 should theoretically be much 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 should be a lot (approximately 5061%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GT 310. (explain)

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

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 7990 is superior to the GeForce GT 310, 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: Memory bandwidth is the max amount of information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface in one second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core clock 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 per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics card could possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the core speed of the card. 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 fill rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.