GeForce GTS 250 1GB vs Radeon HD 7950

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 7950, which features clock speeds of 800 MHz on the GPU, and 1250 MHz on the 1536 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 1792 SPUs along with 112 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTS 250 1GB		145 Watts
Radeon HD 7950		200 Watts
	Difference: 55 Watts (38%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 7950 should theoretically be much faster than the GeForce GTS 250 1GB in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 7950		240000 MB/sec
GeForce GTS 250 1GB		70400 MB/sec
	Difference: 169600 (241%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7950 is much (about 90%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTS 250 1GB. (explain)

Radeon HD 7950		89600 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTS 250 1GB		47232 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 42368 (90%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 7950 is quite a bit (more or less 117%) faster with regards to full screen anti-aliasing than the GeForce GTS 250 1GB, and also should be able to handle higher screen resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

Radeon HD 7950		25600 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTS 250 1GB		11808 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 13792 (117%)

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 largest amount of data (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface within a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the card's clock speed. 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 also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.