GeForce GT 310 vs Radeon HD 5450

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 5450, which makes use of a 40 nm design. AMD has set the core speed at 650 MHz. The DDR3 RAM works at a speed of 800 MHz on this model. It features 80(16x5) SPUs along with 8 TAUs and 4 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 5450		19 Watts
GeForce GT 310		31 Watts
	Difference: 12 Watts (63%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the GeForce GT 310 should be much faster than the Radeon HD 5450 in general. (explain)

GeForce GT 310		16000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5450		12800 MB/sec
	Difference: 3200 (25%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5450 should be a small bit (more or less 10%) better at texture filtering than the GeForce GT 310. (explain)

Radeon HD 5450		5200 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GT 310		4712 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 488 (10%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 5450 is the winner, but only just. (explain)

Radeon HD 5450		2600 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GT 310		2356 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 244 (10%)

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 (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 card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, the better 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 is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card can possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the card's 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 output rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.