GeForce GT 315 vs Radeon HD 3690/3830

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 3690/3830, which has core speeds of 668 MHz on the GPU, and 828 MHz on the 256 MB of GDDR3 RAM. It features 320(64x5) SPUs along with 16 Texture Address Units and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GT 315		52 Watts
Radeon HD 3690/3830		75 Watts
	Difference: 23 Watts (44%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 3690/3830 should be a little bit faster than the GeForce GT 315 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 3690/3830		26496 MB/sec
GeForce GT 315		25280 MB/sec
	Difference: 1216 (5%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 3690/3830 will be just a bit (about 7%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the GeForce GT 315. (explain)

Radeon HD 3690/3830		10688 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GT 315		10000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 688 (7%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 3690/3830 should be a lot (about 114%) better at FSAA than the GeForce GT 315, and also capable of handling higher screen resolutions while still performing well. (explain)

Radeon HD 3690/3830		10688 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GT 315		5000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 5688 (114%)

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 moved past the external memory interface within a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are processed in one second. This is worked out by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core clock 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 applied in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip can possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.