GeForce GTX 970 vs Radeon R7 250X 2GB

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon R7 250X 2GB, which uses a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 1000 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM works at a frequency of 1125 MHz on this specific model. It features 640 SPUs along with 40 Texture Address Units and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R7 250X 2GB		95 Watts
GeForce GTX 970		145 Watts
	Difference: 50 Watts (53%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the GeForce GTX 970 should be 211% quicker than the Radeon R7 250X 2GB in general, due to its greater data rate. (explain)

GeForce GTX 970		224000 MB/sec
Radeon R7 250X 2GB		72000 MB/sec
	Difference: 152000 (211%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 970 should be much (about 173%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon R7 250X 2GB. (explain)

GeForce GTX 970		109200 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R7 250X 2GB		40000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 69200 (173%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 970 will be much (about 320%) faster with regards to FSAA than the Radeon R7 250X 2GB, and also will be able to handle higher resolutions more effectively. (explain)

GeForce GTX 970		67200 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R7 250X 2GB		16000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 51200 (320%)

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 max amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in one second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied in one second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the graphics 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 most pixels the graphics card could possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines 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 fill rate is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.