GeForce GTS 250 512MB vs Radeon R7 260X

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon R7 260X, which comes with core speeds of 1100 MHz on the GPU, and 1625 MHz on the 2048 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 896 SPUs along with 56 TAUs and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R7 260X		115 Watts
GeForce GTS 250 512MB		145 Watts
	Difference: 30 Watts (26%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon R7 260X should theoretically perform much faster than the GeForce GTS 250 512MB in general. (explain)

Radeon R7 260X		104000 MB/sec
GeForce GTS 250 512MB		70400 MB/sec
	Difference: 33600 (48%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R7 260X will be much (about 30%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTS 250 512MB. (explain)

Radeon R7 260X		61600 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTS 250 512MB		47232 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 14368 (30%)

Pixel Rate

If running with lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon R7 260X is a better choice, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon R7 260X		17600 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTS 250 512MB		11808 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 5792 (49%)

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 (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in one second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are processed in one second. This is worked out by multiplying the total texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the video card will be at 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 write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output 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 get to the maximum fill rate.