GeForce GT 310 vs Radeon R7 240

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon R7 240, which has a GPU core clock speed of 730 MHz, and 2048 MB of DDR3 RAM running at 900 MHz through a 128-bit bus. It also is made up of 320 Stream Processors, 20 Texture Address Units, and 8 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R7 240		30 Watts
GeForce GT 310		31 Watts
	Difference: 1 Watts (3%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon R7 240 should be a lot faster than the GeForce GT 310 in general. (explain)

Radeon R7 240		28800 MB/sec
GeForce GT 310		16000 MB/sec
	Difference: 12800 (80%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R7 240 is much (approximately 210%) more effective at texture filtering than the GeForce GT 310. (explain)

Radeon R7 240		14600 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GT 310		4712 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 9888 (210%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R7 240 should be quite a bit (more or less 148%) more effective at full screen anti-aliasing than the GeForce GT 310, and should be able to handle higher screen resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

Radeon R7 240		5840 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GT 310		2356 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 3484 (148%)

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: Memory bandwidth is the largest amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in one second. It is worked out by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the better 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 applied in one second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the 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 that the graphics chip can possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.