GeForce GT 310 vs GeForce GTX 550 Ti

Intro

Compare those specs to the GeForce GTX 550 Ti, which comes with a core clock frequency of 900 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1026 MHz. It also uses a 192-bit bus, and uses a 40 nm design. It is made up of 192 SPUs, 32 Texture Address Units, and 24 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GT 310		31 Watts
GeForce GTX 550 Ti		116 Watts
	Difference: 85 Watts (274%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the GeForce GTX 550 Ti is 516% quicker than the GeForce GT 310 in general, due to its higher bandwidth. (explain)

GeForce GTX 550 Ti		98496 MB/sec
GeForce GT 310		16000 MB/sec
	Difference: 82496 (516%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 550 Ti is quite a bit (more or less 511%) better at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GT 310. (explain)

GeForce GTX 550 Ti		28800 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GT 310		4712 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 24088 (511%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high resolution is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 550 Ti is a better choice, and very much so. (explain)

GeForce GTX 550 Ti		21600 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GT 310		2356 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 19244 (817%)

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 max amount of data (measured in MB per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface within a second. It's calculated by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one second. This is calculated by multiplying the total texture units by the core clock 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 that the graphics card could possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.