GeForce GT 320 vs Radeon HD 6870

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 6870, which comes with a clock speed of 900 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1050 MHz. It also uses a 256-bit memory bus, and makes use of a 40 nm design. It features 1120 SPUs, 56 Texture Address Units, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GT 320		43 Watts
Radeon HD 6870		151 Watts
	Difference: 108 Watts (251%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 6870 should perform much faster than the GeForce GT 320 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 6870		134400 MB/sec
GeForce GT 320		25280 MB/sec
	Difference: 109120 (432%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6870 is quite a bit (more or less 289%) better at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GT 320. (explain)

Radeon HD 6870		50400 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GT 320		12960 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 37440 (289%)

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6870 is superior to the GeForce GT 320, by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 6870		28800 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GT 320		4320 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 24480 (567%)

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 (measured in MB per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface in one second. The number is worked out by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's 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 can be processed in one second. This number 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 per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card can possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel fill rate also depends on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.