GeForce GTS 250 1GB vs Radeon R9 270

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon R9 270, which comes with a GPU core clock speed of 900 MHz, and 2048 MB of GDDR5 RAM set to run at 1400 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is comprised of 1280 SPUs, 80 Texture Address Units, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTS 250 1GB		145 Watts
Radeon R9 270		150 Watts
	Difference: 5 Watts (3%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon R9 270 should in theory perform quite a bit faster than the GeForce GTS 250 1GB in general. (explain)

Radeon R9 270		179200 MB/sec
GeForce GTS 250 1GB		70400 MB/sec
	Difference: 108800 (155%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 270 will be a lot (about 52%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the GeForce GTS 250 1GB. (explain)

Radeon R9 270		72000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTS 250 1GB		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 superior to the GeForce GTS 250 1GB, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon R9 270		28800 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTS 250 1GB		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: Memory bandwidth is the largest amount of data (measured in MB per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR memory, 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 anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be processed in one second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the graphics card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the video card can possibly write to the local memory in one 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 many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.