GeForce GTS 250 512MB vs Radeon HD 4730

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 4730, which has a GPU core clock speed of 700 MHz, and 512 MB of GDDR5 RAM running at 900 MHz through a 128-bit bus. It also is made up of 640(128x5) Stream Processors, 32 Texture Address Units, and 8 ROPs.

(No game benchmarks for this combination yet.)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 4730		140 Watts
GeForce GTS 250 512MB		145 Watts
	Difference: 5 Watts (4%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the GeForce GTS 250 512MB should perform quite a bit faster than the Radeon HD 4730 in general. (explain)

GeForce GTS 250 512MB		70400 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4730		57600 MB/sec
	Difference: 12800 (22%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTS 250 512MB should be a lot (more or less 111%) faster with regards to AF than the Radeon HD 4730. (explain)

GeForce GTS 250 512MB		47232 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4730		22400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 24832 (111%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTS 250 512MB is much (more or less 111%) more effective at AA than the Radeon HD 4730, and also will be capable of handling higher resolutions better. (explain)

GeForce GTS 250 512MB		11808 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4730		5600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 6208 (111%)

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 largest amount of data (in units of MB per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface within a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This number 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 most pixels the video card can possibly write to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel fill rate also depends on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.