GeForce GT 310 vs Radeon HD 4870 X2

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 4870 X2, which comes with core clock speeds of 750 MHz on the GPU, and 900 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 800(160x5) SPUs along with 40 TAUs and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GT 310		31 Watts
Radeon HD 4870 X2		350 Watts
	Difference: 319 Watts (1029%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 4870 X2 should be a lot faster than the GeForce GT 310 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 4870 X2		230400 MB/sec
GeForce GT 310		16000 MB/sec
	Difference: 214400 (1340%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 4870 X2 is quite a bit (approximately 1173%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GT 310. (explain)

Radeon HD 4870 X2		60000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GT 310		4712 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 55288 (1173%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 4870 X2 will be a lot (more or less 919%) better at AA than the GeForce GT 310, and also will be capable of handling higher screen resolutions better. (explain)

Radeon HD 4870 X2		24000 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GT 310		2356 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 21644 (919%)

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 data (counted in megabytes per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface within a second. It is calculated by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total 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 processed in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the graphics card could possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel output rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.