GeForce GT 315 vs Radeon HD 6870

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 6870, which features core clock speeds of 900 MHz on the GPU, and 1050 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 1120 SPUs as well as 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

In theory, the Radeon HD 6870 should be 432% faster than the GeForce GT 315 in general, due to its higher data rate. (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 (approximately 404%) more effective 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

The Radeon HD 6870 is much (approximately 476%) better at AA than the GeForce GT 315, and also will be able to handle higher screen 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 information (counted in MB per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface in a second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR type memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

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