GeForce GT 315 vs Radeon HD 7970

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 7970, which has a core clock speed of 925 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1375 MHz. It also makes use of a 384-bit bus, and makes use of a 28 nm design. It features 2048 SPUs, 128 Texture Address Units, and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GT 315		52 Watts
Radeon HD 7970		250 Watts
	Difference: 198 Watts (381%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the Radeon HD 7970 should be much faster than the GeForce GT 315 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		264000 MB/sec
GeForce GT 315		25280 MB/sec
	Difference: 238720 (944%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7970 will be a lot (approximately 1084%) faster with regards to AF than the GeForce GT 315. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		118400 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GT 315		10000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 108400 (1084%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 7970 is superior to the GeForce GT 315, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		29600 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GT 315		5000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 24600 (492%)

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 max amount of information (measured in MB per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the video card can possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core 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 is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.