GeForce GT 310 vs Radeon HD 6990

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 6990, which comes with a clock speed of 830 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1250 MHz. It also features a 256-bit memory bus, and makes use of a 40 nm design. It is made up of 1536 SPUs, 96 Texture Address Units, and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GT 310		31 Watts
Radeon HD 6990		375 Watts
	Difference: 344 Watts (1110%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 6990 will be 1900% quicker than the GeForce GT 310 overall, because of its higher data rate. (explain)

Radeon HD 6990		320000 MB/sec
GeForce GT 310		16000 MB/sec
	Difference: 304000 (1900%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6990 is a lot (approximately 3282%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GT 310. (explain)

Radeon HD 6990		159360 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GT 310		4712 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 154648 (3282%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6990 is superior to the GeForce GT 310, by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 6990		53120 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GT 310		2356 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 50764 (2155%)

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.

One or more cards in this comparison are multi-core. This means that their bandwidth, texel and pixel rates are theoretically doubled - this does not mean the card will actually perform twice as fast, but only that it should in theory be able to. Actual game benchmarks will give a more accurate idea of what it's capable of.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the max amount of information (in units of MB per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the interface width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the faster 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 number of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed in one second. This is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the video card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card can possibly write to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.