GeForce GT 315 vs Radeon HD 6850

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 6850, which uses a 40 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 775 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM runs at a speed of 1000 MHz on this particular card. It features 960 SPUs along with 48 TAUs and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GT 315		52 Watts
Radeon HD 6850		127 Watts
	Difference: 75 Watts (144%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 6850 should be 406% quicker than the GeForce GT 315 in general, because of its greater data rate. (explain)

Radeon HD 6850		128000 MB/sec
GeForce GT 315		25280 MB/sec
	Difference: 102720 (406%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6850 should be much (approximately 272%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GT 315. (explain)

Radeon HD 6850		37200 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GT 315		10000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 27200 (272%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 6850 should be a lot (more or less 396%) more effective at full screen anti-aliasing than the GeForce GT 315, and should be able to handle higher resolutions more effectively. (explain)

Radeon HD 6850		24800 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GT 315		5000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 19800 (396%)

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 largest amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface within a second. It's calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that are processed in one second. This is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the graphics card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics card could possibly write to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the clock 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 output rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.