GeForce GTS 250 512MB vs Radeon HD 4830 1GB

Intro

The GeForce GTS 250 512MB makes use of a 65/55 nm design. nVidia has set the core speed at 738 MHz. The GDDR3 memory is set to run at a speed of 1100 MHz on this specific card. It features 128 SPUs along with 64 Texture Address Units and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 4830 1GB, which has GPU core speed of 575 MHz, and 1024 MB of GDDR4 RAM running at 900 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is made up of 640(128x5) SPUs, 32 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 4830 1GB Amazon.com Other US-based stores Amazon.co.uk Amazon.de Amazon.fr

Specifications

Model	GeForce GTS 250 512MB	Radeon HD 4830 1GB
Manufacturer	nVidia	ATi
Year	March 3, 2009	Oct 21, 2008
Code Name	G92a/b	RV770 LE
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	575 MHz
Shader Speed	1836 MHz	(N/A) MHz
Memory Speed	1100 MHz	900 MHz
Unified Shaders	128	640(128x5)
Texture Mapping Units	64	32
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	95 watts
Shader Model	4.0	4.1
Bandwidth	70400 MB/sec	57600 MB/sec
Texel Rate	47232 Mtexels/sec	18400 Mtexels/sec
Pixel Rate	11808 Mpixels/sec	9200 Mpixels/sec

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the max amount of information (measured in MB per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the better 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 is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the graphics card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.