GeForce GTS 250 1GB vs Radeon HD 5770

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 5770, which has core clock speeds of 850 MHz on the GPU, and 1200 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 800(160x5) SPUs along with 40 Texture Address Units and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 5770		108 Watts
GeForce GTS 250 1GB		145 Watts
	Difference: 37 Watts (34%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon HD 5770 should in theory be a little bit superior to the GeForce GTS 250 1GB overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 5770		76800 MB/sec
GeForce GTS 250 1GB		70400 MB/sec
	Difference: 6400 (9%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTS 250 1GB will be a lot (approximately 39%) faster with regards to AF than the Radeon HD 5770. (explain)

GeForce GTS 250 1GB		47232 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5770		34000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 13232 (39%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 5770 is superior to the GeForce GTS 250 1GB, but it probably won't make a huge difference. (explain)

Radeon HD 5770		13600 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTS 250 1GB		11808 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 1792 (15%)

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: Bandwidth is the max amount of data (in units of MB per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the better 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 applied in one second. This is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the graphics card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the graphics card could possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.