GeForce GTS 250 1GB vs Radeon R9 270

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon R9 270, which features a core clock frequency of 900 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1400 MHz. It also uses a 256-bit memory bus, and uses a 28 nm design. It is made up 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

Theoretically, the Radeon R9 270 should perform quite a bit faster than the GeForce GTS 250 1GB overall. (explain)

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

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 270 is a lot (more or less 52%) better at anisotropic 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 lots of anti-aliasing 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 maximum amount of data (in units of MB per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface in one second. The number is calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the graphics card can possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.