GeForce GTS 250 1GB vs Radeon HD 7790

Intro

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

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 7790		85 Watts
GeForce GTS 250 1GB		145 Watts
	Difference: 60 Watts (71%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 7790 should theoretically be a lot faster than the GeForce GTS 250 1GB in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 7790		96000 MB/sec
GeForce GTS 250 1GB		70400 MB/sec
	Difference: 25600 (36%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7790 will be a little bit (more or less 19%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTS 250 1GB. (explain)

Radeon HD 7790		56000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTS 250 1GB		47232 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 8768 (19%)

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 7790 is the winner, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 7790		16000 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTS 250 1GB		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 max amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface within a second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once 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 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 figure is worked out by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the graphics card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip can possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel output rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.