GeForce GT 310 vs Radeon R7 250X

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon R7 250X, which has a clock speed of 1000 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1125 MHz. It also makes use of a 128-bit bus, and uses a 28 nm design. It is made up of 640 SPUs, 40 Texture Address Units, and 16 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GT 310		31 Watts
Radeon R7 250X		95 Watts
	Difference: 64 Watts (206%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon R7 250X should be 350% faster than the GeForce GT 310 overall, due to its higher bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon R7 250X		72000 MB/sec
GeForce GT 310		16000 MB/sec
	Difference: 56000 (350%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R7 250X will be much (approximately 749%) better at AF than the GeForce GT 310. (explain)

Radeon R7 250X		40000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GT 310		4712 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 35288 (749%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon R7 250X is a better choice, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon R7 250X		16000 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GT 310		2356 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 13644 (579%)

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 largest amount of information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface within a second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's bus 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 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, 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 can be applied per second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core clock 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 processed in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.