GeForce GT 310 vs Radeon HD 6950

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 6950, which comes with GPU clock speed of 800 MHz, and 1024 MB of GDDR5 RAM running at 1250 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also features 1408 SPUs, 88 TAUs, 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 6950		200 Watts
	Difference: 169 Watts (545%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon HD 6950 should theoretically be much better than the GeForce GT 310 overall. (explain)

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

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6950 should be quite a bit (approximately 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

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6950 is a better choice, and very much so. (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 information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in one second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the graphics card could possibly write to the 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 clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as 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, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.