GeForce GTS 250 1GB vs Radeon HD 4830 512MB

Intro

The GeForce GTS 250 1GB features a GPU core clock speed of 738 MHz, and the 1024 MB of GDDR3 memory runs at 1100 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is comprised of 128 Stream Processors, 64 Texture Address Units, and 16 ROPs.

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 4830 512MB, which comes with a clock frequency of 575 MHz and a GDDR3 memory speed of 900 MHz. It also makes use of a 256-bit bus, and uses a 55 nm design. It features 640(128x5) SPUs, 32 Texture Address Units, and 16 ROPs.

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 1GB Amazon.com Other US-based stores Amazon.co.uk Amazon.de Amazon.fr

Radeon HD 4830 512MB Amazon.com Other US-based stores Amazon.co.uk Amazon.de Amazon.fr

Specifications

Model	GeForce GTS 250 1GB	Radeon HD 4830 512MB
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	1024 MB	512 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	GDDR3
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 maximum amount of information (in units of MB per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface within a second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses 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, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This is worked out by multiplying the total amount of 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 in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.