GeForce GT 310 vs Radeon HD 6870

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 6870, which uses a 40 nm design. AMD has set the core frequency at 900 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM is set to run at a frequency of 1050 MHz on this card. It features 1120 SPUs along with 56 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GT 310		31 Watts
Radeon HD 6870		151 Watts
	Difference: 120 Watts (387%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 6870 should theoretically perform much faster than the GeForce GT 310 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 6870		134400 MB/sec
GeForce GT 310		16000 MB/sec
	Difference: 118400 (740%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6870 will be a lot (approximately 970%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the GeForce GT 310. (explain)

Radeon HD 6870		50400 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GT 310		4712 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 45688 (970%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 6870 should be a lot (about 1122%) better at FSAA than the GeForce GT 310, and capable of handling higher resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

Radeon HD 6870		28800 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GT 310		2356 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 26444 (1122%)

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 data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in one second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the memory bandwidth, the better 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core clock 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 applied per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip could possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.