GeForce 9800 GTX vs Radeon R7 250

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon R7 250, which makes use of a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 1000 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM is set to run at a frequency of 1150 MHz on this model. It features 384 SPUs along with 24 Texture Address Units and 8 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R7 250		65 Watts
GeForce 9800 GTX		140 Watts
	Difference: 75 Watts (115%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon R7 250 should in theory perform a bit faster than the GeForce 9800 GTX overall. (explain)

Radeon R7 250		73600 MB/sec
GeForce 9800 GTX		70400 MB/sec
	Difference: 3200 (5%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce 9800 GTX will be much (approximately 80%) better at AF than the Radeon R7 250. (explain)

GeForce 9800 GTX		43200 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R7 250		24000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 19200 (80%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce 9800 GTX is quite a bit (more or less 35%) more effective at anti-aliasing than the Radeon R7 250, and also should be capable of handling higher resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

GeForce 9800 GTX		10800 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R7 250		8000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 2800 (35%)

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: Memory bandwidth is the maximum amount of information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in one second. It is worked out by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR type memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed in one second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total 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 in a second.

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