GeForce GTS 250 512MB vs Radeon HD 4850 1GB

Intro

The GeForce GTS 250 512MB comes with a GPU core clock speed of 738 MHz, and the 512 MB of GDDR3 RAM runs at 1100 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is made up of 128 Stream Processors, 64 TAUs, and 16 Raster Operation Units.

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 4850 1GB, which uses a 55 nm design. ATi has set the core frequency at 625 MHz. The GDDR4 memory runs at a speed of 993 MHz on this card. It features 800(160x5) SPUs along with 40 TAUs and 16 Rasterization Operator 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 1GB Amazon.com Other US-based stores Amazon.co.uk Amazon.de Amazon.fr

Specifications

Model	GeForce GTS 250 512MB	Radeon HD 4850 1GB
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	1024 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	GDDR4
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: Bandwidth is the largest amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface in a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the faster 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 applied in one second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the graphics card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in a second.

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