GeForce GTS 250 512MB vs Radeon HD 7790

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 7790, which comes with clock speeds of 1000 MHz on the GPU, and 1500 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 896 SPUs along with 56 Texture Address Units and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 7790		85 Watts
GeForce GTS 250 512MB		145 Watts
	Difference: 60 Watts (71%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 7790 should in theory be quite a bit faster than the GeForce GTS 250 512MB in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 7790		96000 MB/sec
GeForce GTS 250 512MB		70400 MB/sec
	Difference: 25600 (36%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7790 is just a bit (approximately 19%) better at AF than the GeForce GTS 250 512MB. (explain)

Radeon HD 7790		56000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTS 250 512MB		47232 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 8768 (19%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 7790 should be a lot (about 36%) better at full screen anti-aliasing than the GeForce GTS 250 512MB, and also will be capable of handling higher resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

Radeon HD 7790		16000 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTS 250 512MB		11808 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 4192 (36%)

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 largest amount of information (in units of MB per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR RAM, it must 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 anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics card can possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.