GeForce GT 315 vs Radeon HD 6870

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 6870, which comes with core speeds of 900 MHz on the GPU, and 1050 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 1120 SPUs along with 56 Texture Address Units 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

As far as performance goes, the Radeon HD 6870 should theoretically be quite a bit better than the GeForce GT 315 overall. (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 texture filtering than the GeForce GT 315. (explain)

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

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 6870 should be quite a bit (about 476%) more effective at full screen anti-aliasing than the GeForce GT 315, and capable of handling higher resolutions more effectively. (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 maximum amount of data (measured in MB per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If 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 texture map elements (texels) that can be processed in one second. This is calculated by multiplying the total texture units by the core speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the video card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels per second.

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