GeForce GT 315 vs Radeon HD 6870

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 6870, which has core clock speeds of 900 MHz on the GPU, and 1050 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 1120 SPUs along with 56 TAUs and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GT 315		52 Watts
Radeon HD 6870		151 Watts
	Difference: 99 Watts (190%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon HD 6870 should theoretically be quite a bit superior to the GeForce GT 315 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 6870		134400 MB/sec
GeForce GT 315		25280 MB/sec
	Difference: 109120 (432%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6870 will be a lot (about 404%) better at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GT 315. (explain)

Radeon HD 6870		50400 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GT 315		10000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 40400 (404%)

Pixel Rate

If using lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6870 is superior to the GeForce GT 315, by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 6870		28800 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GT 315		5000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 23800 (476%)

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 largest amount of data (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface in a second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's bus 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 card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR 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 handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the graphics card could possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.