GeForce GTS 250 1GB vs Radeon R9 390X 8G

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon R9 390X 8G, which features a core clock speed of 1050 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1500 MHz. It also makes use of a 512-bit bus, and makes use of a 28 nm design. It features 2816 SPUs, 176 Texture Address Units, and 64 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTS 250 1GB		145 Watts
Radeon R9 390X 8G		275 Watts
	Difference: 130 Watts (90%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon R9 390X 8G will be 445% quicker than the GeForce GTS 250 1GB overall, due to its greater bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon R9 390X 8G		384000 MB/sec
GeForce GTS 250 1GB		70400 MB/sec
	Difference: 313600 (445%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 390X 8G will be a lot (about 291%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the GeForce GTS 250 1GB. (explain)

Radeon R9 390X 8G		184800 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTS 250 1GB		47232 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 137568 (291%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R9 390X 8G will be quite a bit (about 469%) better at anti-aliasing than the GeForce GTS 250 1GB, and will be capable of handling higher screen resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

Radeon R9 390X 8G		67200 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTS 250 1GB		11808 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 55392 (469%)

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 megabytes per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface within a second. It's worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once 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 are applied in one second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the card will be at 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 record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the card's 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 lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.