GeForce GT 315 vs Radeon HD 6950

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 6950, which makes use of a 40 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 800 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM is set to run at a speed of 1250 MHz on this particular model. It features 1408 SPUs along with 88 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GT 315		52 Watts
Radeon HD 6950		200 Watts
	Difference: 148 Watts (285%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon HD 6950 should theoretically be a lot superior to the GeForce GT 315 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950		160000 MB/sec
GeForce GT 315		25280 MB/sec
	Difference: 134720 (533%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6950 will be a lot (approximately 604%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GT 315. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950		70400 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GT 315		10000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 60400 (604%)

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6950 is superior to the GeForce GT 315, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950		25600 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GT 315		5000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 20600 (412%)

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: Memory bandwidth is the largest amount of information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in a second. It's worked out by multiplying the interface width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the faster 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 number of texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one second. This is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core 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 applied per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the graphics card can possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the the core 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 is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.