GeForce GT 310 vs Radeon R9 M265X

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon R9 M265X, which has core clock speeds of 575 MHz on the GPU, and 1125 MHz on the 2048 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 640 SPUs as well as 40 TAUs and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon R9 M265X should perform much faster than the GeForce GT 310 in general. (explain)

Radeon R9 M265X		72000 MB/sec
GeForce GT 310		16000 MB/sec
	Difference: 56000 (350%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 M265X is quite a bit (about 388%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the GeForce GT 310. (explain)

Radeon R9 M265X		23000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GT 310		4712 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 18288 (388%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon R9 M265X is the winner, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon R9 M265X		9200 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GT 310		2356 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 6844 (290%)

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 MB per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the graphics 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 chip can possibly write to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.