GeForce GT 320 vs Radeon HD 6870

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 6870, which makes use of a 40 nm design. AMD has set the core speed at 900 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM is set to run at a speed of 1050 MHz on this specific card. It features 1120 SPUs as well as 56 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GT 320		43 Watts
Radeon HD 6870		151 Watts
	Difference: 108 Watts (251%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 6870, in theory, should perform quite a bit faster than the GeForce GT 320 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 6870		134400 MB/sec
GeForce GT 320		25280 MB/sec
	Difference: 109120 (432%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6870 is a lot (approximately 289%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GT 320. (explain)

Radeon HD 6870		50400 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GT 320		12960 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 37440 (289%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6870 is superior to the GeForce GT 320, by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 6870		28800 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GT 320		4320 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 24480 (567%)

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 maximum amount of information (measured in MB per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in one second. It's calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the graphics card could possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate is also dependant on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.