GeForce GT 310 vs Radeon HD 5830

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 5830, which uses a 40 nm design. AMD has set the core speed at 800 MHz. The GDDR5 memory works at a frequency of 1000 MHz on this specific model. It features 1120(224x5) SPUs as well as 56 TAUs and 16 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 5830		175 Watts
	Difference: 144 Watts (465%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 5830 should theoretically be much faster than the GeForce GT 310 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 5830		128000 MB/sec
GeForce GT 310		16000 MB/sec
	Difference: 112000 (700%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5830 will be quite a bit (about 851%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GT 310. (explain)

Radeon HD 5830		44800 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GT 310		4712 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 40088 (851%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 5830 is superior to the GeForce GT 310, by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 5830		12800 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GT 310		2356 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 10444 (443%)

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: Bandwidth is the max amount of information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in one second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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