GeForce GT 310 vs Radeon HD 6950

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 6950, which makes use of a 40 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 800 MHz. The GDDR5 memory runs at a frequency of 1250 MHz on this specific model. It features 1408 SPUs along with 88 TAUs and 32 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 6950		200 Watts
	Difference: 169 Watts (545%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon HD 6950 should in theory be a lot superior to the GeForce GT 310 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950		160000 MB/sec
GeForce GT 310		16000 MB/sec
	Difference: 144000 (900%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6950 is a lot (about 1394%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GT 310. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950		70400 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GT 310		4712 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 65688 (1394%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 6950 is much (more or less 987%) more effective at FSAA than the GeForce GT 310, and capable of handling higher resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950		25600 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GT 310		2356 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 23244 (987%)

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 (measured in MB per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface within a second. It's calculated by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the better 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 is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the graphics card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the video card could possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the number of colour ROPs 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 output rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.