GeForce GTS 250 1GB vs Radeon HD 4850 1GB

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 4850 1GB, which has a GPU core clock speed of 625 MHz, and 1024 MB of GDDR4 RAM set to run at 993 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also features 800(160x5) Stream Processors, 40 TAUs, and 16 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 4850 1GB		110 Watts
GeForce GTS 250 1GB		145 Watts
	Difference: 35 Watts (32%)

Memory Bandwidth

The GeForce GTS 250 1GB should theoretically perform a bit faster than the Radeon HD 4850 1GB overall. (explain)

GeForce GTS 250 1GB		70400 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4850 1GB		63552 MB/sec
	Difference: 6848 (11%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTS 250 1GB is quite a bit (more or less 89%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 4850 1GB. (explain)

GeForce GTS 250 1GB		47232 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4850 1GB		25000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 22232 (89%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the GeForce GTS 250 1GB is superior to the Radeon HD 4850 1GB, though only just barely. (explain)

GeForce GTS 250 1GB		11808 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4850 1GB		10000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 1808 (18%)

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 max amount of information (counted in MB per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in a second. It 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 it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the graphics card can possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the number of Render Output Units 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 fill rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.