GeForce GT 210 vs GeForce GT 310

Intro

Compare that to the GeForce GT 310, which comes with a clock frequency of 589 MHz and a DDR2 memory speed of 1000 MHz. It also makes use of a 64-bit memory bus, and makes use of a 40 nm design. It features 16 SPUs, 8 Texture Address Units, and 4 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Both cards have the same power consumption.

Memory Bandwidth

The GeForce GT 310 should theoretically be quite a bit faster than the GeForce GT 210 overall. (explain)

GeForce GT 310		16000 MB/sec
GeForce GT 210		12800 MB/sec
	Difference: 3200 (25%)

Texel Rate

Both cards have the exact same texel rate, so theoretically they should perform equally good at at AF. (explain)

Pixel Rate

Both cards have the exact same pixel rate, so theoretically they should perform equally good at at anti-aliasing, and be able to handle the same resolutions. (explain)

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 maximum amount of information (in units of MB per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface within a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR memory, it must 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 AA, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be processed in one second. This is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the video 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 one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.