GeForce GTS 250 512MB vs Radeon R9 270

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon R9 270, which comes with core speeds of 900 MHz on the GPU, and 1400 MHz on the 2048 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 1280 SPUs as well as 80 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTS 250 512MB		145 Watts
Radeon R9 270		150 Watts
	Difference: 5 Watts (3%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon R9 270 should be 155% faster than the GeForce GTS 250 512MB overall, due to its greater bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon R9 270		179200 MB/sec
GeForce GTS 250 512MB		70400 MB/sec
	Difference: 108800 (155%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 270 should be quite a bit (approximately 52%) better at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTS 250 512MB. (explain)

Radeon R9 270		72000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTS 250 512MB		47232 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 24768 (52%)

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon R9 270 is the winner, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon R9 270		28800 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTS 250 512MB		11808 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 16992 (144%)

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 within a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the better 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 can be applied per second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core clock 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 in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the graphics card could possibly record to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). 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 ability to reach the max fill rate.