GeForce GT 310 vs Radeon HD 6850

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 6850, which comes with clock speeds of 775 MHz on the GPU, and 1000 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 960 SPUs along with 48 TAUs and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GT 310		31 Watts
Radeon HD 6850		127 Watts
	Difference: 96 Watts (310%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 6850, in theory, should perform much faster than the GeForce GT 310 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 6850		128000 MB/sec
GeForce GT 310		16000 MB/sec
	Difference: 112000 (700%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6850 is quite a bit (approximately 689%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the GeForce GT 310. (explain)

Radeon HD 6850		37200 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GT 310		4712 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 32488 (689%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 6850 should be a lot (approximately 953%) more effective at AA than the GeForce GT 310, and will be able to handle higher resolutions better. (explain)

Radeon HD 6850		24800 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GT 310		2356 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 22444 (953%)

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 MB per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface within a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip could possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the clock 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 is also dependant on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.