GeForce GT 310 vs Radeon HD 5450

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 5450, which uses a 40 nm design. AMD has set the core speed at 650 MHz. The DDR3 RAM works at a frequency of 800 MHz on this card. It features 80(16x5) SPUs as well as 8 Texture Address Units and 4 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 5450		19 Watts
GeForce GT 310		31 Watts
	Difference: 12 Watts (63%)

Memory Bandwidth

The GeForce GT 310, in theory, should be much faster than the Radeon HD 5450 overall. (explain)

GeForce GT 310		16000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5450		12800 MB/sec
	Difference: 3200 (25%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5450 will be a little bit (more or less 10%) better at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GT 310. (explain)

Radeon HD 5450		5200 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GT 310		4712 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 488 (10%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 5450 should be just a bit (approximately 10%) better at anti-aliasing than the GeForce GT 310, and able to handle higher resolutions better. (explain)

Radeon HD 5450		2600 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GT 310		2356 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 244 (10%)

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 maximum amount of data (in units of 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 RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This is calculated by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The better this number, 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 amount of pixels the video card can possibly write to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.