GeForce GT 310 vs Radeon HD 6970

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 6970, which comes with a clock frequency of 880 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1375 MHz. It also uses a 256-bit memory bus, and makes use of a 40 nm design. It is comprised of 1536 SPUs, 96 Texture Address Units, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GT 310		31 Watts
Radeon HD 6970		250 Watts
	Difference: 219 Watts (706%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon HD 6970 should in theory be quite a bit better than the GeForce GT 310 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		176000 MB/sec
GeForce GT 310		16000 MB/sec
	Difference: 160000 (1000%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6970 is much (approximately 1693%) faster with regards to AF than the GeForce GT 310. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		84480 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GT 310		4712 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 79768 (1693%)

Pixel Rate

If using lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6970 is superior to the GeForce GT 310, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		28160 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GT 310		2356 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 25804 (1095%)

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 largest amount of information (measured in MB per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface in a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses 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 high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the video card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the graphics card could possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.