GeForce GTS 250 512MB vs Radeon HD 5770

Intro

The GeForce GTS 250 512MB features a core clock speed of 738 MHz and a GDDR3 memory frequency of 1100 MHz. It also uses a 256-bit memory bus, and uses a 65/55 nm design. It is made up of 128 SPUs, 64 Texture Address Units, and 16 ROPs.

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 5770, which comes with a core clock speed of 850 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1200 MHz. It also makes use of a 128-bit memory bus, and uses a 40 nm design. It is comprised of 800(160x5) SPUs, 40 Texture Address Units, and 16 ROPs.

Price Comparison

GeForce GTS 250 512MB Amazon.com

Radeon HD 5770 Amazon.com

Please note that the price comparisons are based on search keywords - sometimes it might show cards with very similar names that are not exactly the same as the one chosen in the comparison. We do try to filter out the wrong results as best we can, though.

Specifications

Model	GeForce GTS 250 512MB	Radeon HD 5770
Manufacturer	nVidia	AMD
Year	March 3, 2009	October 13, 2009
Code Name	G92a/b	Juniper XT
Fab Process	65/55 nm	40 nm
Bus	PCIe x16 2.0	PCIe 2.1 x16
Memory	512 MB	1024 MB
Core Speed	738 MHz	850 MHz
Shader Speed	1836 MHz	(N/A) MHz
Memory Speed	1100 MHz (2200 MHz effective)	1200 MHz (4800 MHz effective)
Unified Shaders	128	800(160x5)
Texture Mapping Units	64	40
Render Output Units	16	16
Bus Type	GDDR3	GDDR5
Bus Width	256-bit	128-bit
DirectX Version	DirectX 10	DirectX 11
OpenGL Version	OpenGL 3.1	OpenGL 3.2
Power (Max TDP)	145 watts	108 watts
Shader Model	4.0	5.0
Bandwidth	70400 MB/sec	76800 MB/sec
Texel Rate	47232 Mtexels/sec	34000 Mtexels/sec
Pixel Rate	11808 Mpixels/sec	13600 Mpixels/sec

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the maximum amount of data (in units of MB per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in one second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the graphics card could possibly write to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.