GeForce GTS 250 512MB vs Radeon HD 5770

Intro

The GeForce GTS 250 512MB makes use of a 65/55 nm design. nVidia has clocked the core frequency at 738 MHz. The GDDR3 memory is set to run at a speed of 1100 MHz on this card. It features 128 SPUs as well as 64 Texture Address Units and 16 ROPs.

Compare that to the Radeon HD 5770, which uses a 40 nm design. AMD has set the core frequency at 850 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM runs at a speed of 1200 MHz on this particular model. It features 800(160x5) SPUs along with 40 TAUs and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

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 max amount of data (counted in MB per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high 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 clock speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the video card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.