GeForce GT 320 vs Radeon HD 6970

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 6970, which features clock speeds of 880 MHz on the GPU, and 1375 MHz on the 2048 MB of GDDR5 RAM. 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 320		43 Watts
Radeon HD 6970		250 Watts
	Difference: 207 Watts (481%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 6970, in theory, should perform much faster than the GeForce GT 320 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		176000 MB/sec
GeForce GT 320		25280 MB/sec
	Difference: 150720 (596%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6970 will be quite a bit (approximately 552%) more effective at AF than the GeForce GT 320. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		84480 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GT 320		12960 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 71520 (552%)

Pixel Rate

If using lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6970 is a better choice, by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		28160 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GT 320		4320 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 23840 (552%)

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 maximum amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface within a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR type memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. 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 texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the video 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 maximum number of pixels the video card can possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.