GeForce GTS 250 512MB vs Radeon HD 4850 512MB

Intro

The GeForce GTS 250 512MB uses a 65/55 nm design. nVidia has clocked the core speed at 738 MHz. The GDDR3 memory runs at a speed of 1100 MHz on this model. It features 128 SPUs as well as 64 Texture Address Units and 16 ROPs.

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 4850 512MB, which features a GPU core clock speed of 625 MHz, and 512 MB of GDDR3 RAM set to run at 993 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also features 800(160x5) SPUs, 40 Texture Address Units, and 16 Raster Operation Units.

Price Comparison

Please note that the price comparisons are based on search keywords, and might not be the exact same card listed on this page. We have no control over the accuracy of their search results.

GeForce GTS 250 512MB Amazon.com Other US-based stores Amazon.co.uk Amazon.de Amazon.fr

Radeon HD 4850 512MB Amazon.com Other US-based stores Amazon.co.uk Amazon.de Amazon.fr

Specifications

Model	GeForce GTS 250 512MB	Radeon HD 4850 512MB
Manufacturer	nVidia	ATi
Year	March 3, 2009	Jun 25, 2008
Code Name	G92a/b	RV770 PRO
Fab Process	65/55 nm	55 nm
Bus	PCIe x16 2.0	PCIe 2.0 x16
Memory	512 MB	512 MB
Core Speed	738 MHz	625 MHz
Shader Speed	1836 MHz	(N/A) MHz
Memory Speed	1100 MHz	993 MHz
Unified Shaders	128	800(160x5)
Texture Mapping Units	64	40
Render Output Units	16	16
Bus Type	GDDR3	GDDR3
Bus Width	256-bit	256-bit
DirectX Version	DirectX 10	DirectX 10.1
OpenGL Version	OpenGL 3.1	OpenGL 3.0
Power (Max TDP)	145 watts	110 watts
Shader Model	4.0	4.1
Bandwidth	70400 MB/sec	63552 MB/sec
Texel Rate	47232 Mtexels/sec	25000 Mtexels/sec
Pixel Rate	11808 Mpixels/sec	10000 Mpixels/sec

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the maximum amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in one second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the 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 texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This is worked out by multiplying the total texture units by the core speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics card can possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.