GeForce GTX 260 vs Radeon R7 250X

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon R7 250X, which comes with core speeds of 1000 MHz on the GPU, and 1125 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 640 SPUs as well as 40 Texture Address Units and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R7 250X		95 Watts
GeForce GTX 260		182 Watts
	Difference: 87 Watts (92%)

Memory Bandwidth

The GeForce GTX 260 should in theory perform quite a bit faster than the Radeon R7 250X overall. (explain)

GeForce GTX 260		111888 MB/sec
Radeon R7 250X		72000 MB/sec
	Difference: 39888 (55%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R7 250X is just a bit (approximately 9%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTX 260. (explain)

Radeon R7 250X		40000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 260		36864 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 3136 (9%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 260 should be a small bit (approximately 1%) more effective at anti-aliasing than the Radeon R7 250X, and should be able to handle higher screen resolutions more effectively. (explain)

GeForce GTX 260		16128 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R7 250X		16000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 128 (1%)

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 maximum amount of information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface within a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the graphics card can possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the number of ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel output rate also depends on many 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.