GeForce GT 310 vs Radeon HD 6850

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 6850, which makes use of a 40 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 775 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM runs at a speed of 1000 MHz on this particular model. It features 960 SPUs as well as 48 TAUs and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

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

In theory, the Radeon HD 6850 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 should be quite a bit (approximately 689%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GT 310. (explain)

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

Pixel Rate

If running with lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6850 is a better choice, by a large margin. (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 maximum amount of data (in units of MB per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in one second. The number is calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the bandwidth is, the better 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the card will be at 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 that the graphics card can possibly write to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the card's 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 rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.