GeForce GT 310 vs Radeon R7 M260

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon R7 M260, which comes with a GPU core clock speed of 715 MHz, and 2048 MB of DDR3 memory set to run at 1000 MHz through a 64-bit bus. It also is comprised of 384 SPUs, 24 Texture Address Units, and 8 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Both cards have exactly the same memory bandwidth, so in theory they should perform the same. (explain)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R7 M260 is quite a bit (more or less 264%) more effective at texture filtering than the GeForce GT 310. (explain)

Radeon R7 M260		17160 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GT 310		4712 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 12448 (264%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R7 M260 should be a lot (more or less 143%) faster with regards to anti-aliasing than the GeForce GT 310, and also should be capable of handling higher screen resolutions while still performing well. (explain)

Radeon R7 M260		5720 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GT 310		2356 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 3364 (143%)

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 (counted in MB per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, the faster 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 applied in one second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the graphics card will be at 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 the graphics card could possibly write to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called 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 - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.