GeForce GTS 250 1GB vs Radeon HD 7970

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 7970, which comes with a clock frequency of 925 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1375 MHz. It also features a 384-bit bus, and makes use of a 28 nm design. It features 2048 SPUs, 128 Texture Address Units, and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTS 250 1GB		145 Watts
Radeon HD 7970		250 Watts
	Difference: 105 Watts (72%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 7970 should be much faster than the GeForce GTS 250 1GB in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		264000 MB/sec
GeForce GTS 250 1GB		70400 MB/sec
	Difference: 193600 (275%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7970 will be much (about 151%) more effective at AF than the GeForce GTS 250 1GB. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		118400 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTS 250 1GB		47232 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 71168 (151%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 7970 should be a lot (more or less 151%) faster with regards to AA than the GeForce GTS 250 1GB, and also able to handle higher resolutions while still performing well. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		29600 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTS 250 1GB		11808 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 17792 (151%)

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 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 interface width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, 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 texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the video 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 can possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. 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 max fill rate.