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GeForce GT 315 vs GeForce GT 320

Intro

The GeForce GT 315 makes use of a 40 nm design. nVidia has clocked the core frequency at 625 MHz. The DDR3 RAM works at a frequency of 790 MHz on this particular card. It features 48 SPUs as well as 16 TAUs and 8 ROPs.

Compare all of that to the GeForce GT 320, which has core speeds of 540 MHz on the GPU, and 790 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR3 memory. It features 72 SPUs as well as 24 TAUs and 8 Rasterization Operator Units.

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GT 320		43 Watts
GeForce GT 315		52 Watts
	Difference: 9 Watts (21%)

Memory Bandwidth

Both cards have the exact same bandwidth, so in theory they should perform exactly the same. (explain)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GT 320 is a lot (more or less 30%) more effective at AF than the GeForce GT 315. (explain)

GeForce GT 320		12960 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GT 315		10000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 2960 (30%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GT 315 will be a bit (about 16%) faster with regards to anti-aliasing than the GeForce GT 320, and also should be able to handle higher screen resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

GeForce GT 315		5000 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GT 320		4320 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 680 (16%)

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

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GeForce GT 315

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GeForce GT 320

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Specifications

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Model	GeForce GT 315	GeForce GT 320
Manufacturer	nVidia	nVidia
Year	November 2009	February 2010
Code Name	GT216	GT215
Memory	512 MB	1024 MB
Core Speed	625 MHz	540 MHz
Memory Speed	1580 MHz	1580 MHz
Power (Max TDP)	52 watts	43 watts
Bandwidth	25280 MB/sec	25280 MB/sec
Texel Rate	10000 Mtexels/sec	12960 Mtexels/sec
Pixel Rate	5000 Mpixels/sec	4320 Mpixels/sec
Unified Shaders	48	72
Texture Mapping Units	16	24
Render Output Units	8	8
Bus Type	DDR3	GDDR3
Bus Width	128-bit	128-bit
Fab Process	40 nm	40 nm
Transistors	486 million	727 million
Bus	PCIe 2.0	PCIe x16
DirectX Version	DirectX 10.1	DirectX 10.1
OpenGL Version	OpenGL 3.2	OpenGL 3.3

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the maximum amount of information (in units of MB per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in a second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the graphics card could possibly write to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.

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