GeForce 8500 GT vs Radeon R7 250

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon R7 250, which makes use of a 28 nm design. AMD has set the core speed at 1000 MHz. The GDDR5 memory runs at a speed of 1150 MHz on this specific card. It features 384 SPUs along with 24 Texture Address Units and 8 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 8500 GT		45 Watts
Radeon R7 250		65 Watts
	Difference: 20 Watts (44%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon R7 250 should theoretically be a lot better than the GeForce 8500 GT in general. (explain)

Radeon R7 250		73600 MB/sec
GeForce 8500 GT		12800 MB/sec
	Difference: 60800 (475%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R7 250 will be quite a bit (about 567%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the GeForce 8500 GT. (explain)

Radeon R7 250		24000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 8500 GT		3600 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 20400 (567%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon R7 250 is the winner, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon R7 250		8000 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 8500 GT		1800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 6200 (344%)

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 (counted in MB per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface within a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the 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 amount of pixels that the graphics card could possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.