GeForce GT 310 vs Radeon R9 M290X

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon R9 M290X, which features clock speeds of 850 MHz on the GPU, and 1200 MHz on the 4096 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 1280 SPUs as well as 80 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 M290X		100 Watts
	Difference: 69 Watts (223%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the Radeon R9 M290X should be quite a bit faster than the GeForce GT 310 overall. (explain)

Radeon R9 M290X		153600 MB/sec
GeForce GT 310		16000 MB/sec
	Difference: 137600 (860%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 M290X will be a lot (more or less 1343%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GT 310. (explain)

Radeon R9 M290X		68000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GT 310		4712 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 63288 (1343%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R9 M290X is a lot (approximately 1054%) more effective at FSAA than the GeForce GT 310, and will be capable of handling higher resolutions better. (explain)

Radeon R9 M290X		27200 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GT 310		2356 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 24844 (1054%)

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 information (in units of MB per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in one second. It's calculated by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, 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 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 amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.