GeForce GTS 250 1GB vs GeForce GTX 870M

Intro

Compare all of that to the GeForce GTX 870M, which uses a 28 nm design. nVidia has clocked the core speed at 941 MHz. The GDDR5 memory is set to run at a frequency of 1000 MHz on this card. It features 1344 SPUs as well as 112 Texture Address Units and 24 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 870M		110 Watts
GeForce GTS 250 1GB		145 Watts
	Difference: 35 Watts (32%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the GeForce GTX 870M should in theory be a lot superior to the GeForce GTS 250 1GB overall. (explain)

GeForce GTX 870M		96000 MB/sec
GeForce GTS 250 1GB		70400 MB/sec
	Difference: 25600 (36%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 870M should be a lot (about 123%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTS 250 1GB. (explain)

GeForce GTX 870M		105392 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTS 250 1GB		47232 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 58160 (123%)

Pixel Rate

If using lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 870M is the winner, and very much so. (explain)

GeForce GTX 870M		22584 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTS 250 1GB		11808 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 10776 (91%)

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 maximum amount of information (counted in MB per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 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, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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

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