GeForce GT 310 vs Radeon HD 5550

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 5550, which comes with a clock speed of 550 MHz and a DDR2 memory speed of 400 MHz. It also features a 128-bit bus, and uses a 40 nm design. It is comprised of 320(64x5) SPUs, 16 TAUs, and 8 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the GeForce GT 310 should be quite a bit faster than the Radeon HD 5550 in general. (explain)

GeForce GT 310		16000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5550		12800 MB/sec
	Difference: 3200 (25%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5550 is quite a bit (approximately 87%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GT 310. (explain)

Radeon HD 5550		8800 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GT 310		4712 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 4088 (87%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 5550 should be a lot (more or less 87%) more effective at FSAA than the GeForce GT 310, and also will be able to handle higher resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

Radeon HD 5550		4400 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GT 310		2356 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 2044 (87%)

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 maximum amount of data (counted in MB per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface in one second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.