GeForce GT 315 vs Radeon HD 6970

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 6970, which makes use of a 40 nm design. AMD has set the core speed at 880 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM works at a speed of 1375 MHz on this model. It features 1536 SPUs as well as 96 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 6970		250 Watts
	Difference: 198 Watts (381%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 6970 is 596% quicker than the GeForce GT 315 in general, due to its higher data rate. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		176000 MB/sec
GeForce GT 315		25280 MB/sec
	Difference: 150720 (596%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6970 is quite a bit (more or less 745%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the GeForce GT 315. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		84480 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GT 315		10000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 74480 (745%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6970 is superior to the GeForce GT 315, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		28160 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GT 315		5000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 23160 (463%)

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 (in units of MB per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface within a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's memory bandwidth, 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 applied in one second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total number 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 handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the video card could possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.