GeForce GT 310 vs Radeon R9 380 4G

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon R9 380 4G, which comes with core speeds of 970 MHz on the GPU, and 1425 MHz on the 4096 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 1792 SPUs as well as 112 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GT 310		31 Watts
Radeon R9 380 4G		190 Watts
	Difference: 159 Watts (513%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon R9 380 4G should theoretically perform much faster than the GeForce GT 310 in general. (explain)

Radeon R9 380 4G		182400 MB/sec
GeForce GT 310		16000 MB/sec
	Difference: 166400 (1040%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 380 4G is a lot (about 2206%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GT 310. (explain)

Radeon R9 380 4G		108640 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GT 310		4712 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 103928 (2206%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon R9 380 4G is the winner, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon R9 380 4G		31040 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GT 310		2356 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 28684 (1217%)

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 (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface within a second. It's worked out by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are 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 higher this number, the better the 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 most pixels the graphics card could possibly write 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 speed of the card. 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 also depends on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.