GeForce GTS 250 1GB vs Radeon HD 6450 (OEM)

Intro

The GeForce GTS 250 1GB makes use of a 65/55 nm design. nVidia has set the core speed at 738 MHz. The GDDR3 memory is set to run at a speed of 1100 MHz on this particular card. It features 128 SPUs as well as 64 Texture Address Units and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 6450 (OEM), which features a clock speed of 625 MHz and a GDDR3 memory frequency of 800 MHz. It also features a 64-bit bus, and makes use of a 40 nm design. It features 160 SPUs, 8 Texture Address Units, and 4 Raster Operation Units.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the largest amount of information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR type memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total texture units by the core speed of the chip. The better this number, 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 amount of pixels the graphics card can possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.