GeForce GTS 250 512MB vs Radeon R9 M385X

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon R9 M385X, which uses a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 1100 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM is set to run at a frequency of 1500 MHz on this particular card. It features 896 SPUs along with 56 Texture Address Units and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon R9 M385X should be 36% faster than the GeForce GTS 250 512MB overall, due to its greater bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon R9 M385X		96000 MB/sec
GeForce GTS 250 512MB		70400 MB/sec
	Difference: 25600 (36%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 M385X will be quite a bit (approximately 30%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTS 250 512MB. (explain)

Radeon R9 M385X		61600 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTS 250 512MB		47232 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 14368 (30%)

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon R9 M385X is a better choice, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon R9 M385X		17600 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTS 250 512MB		11808 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 5792 (49%)

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: Memory bandwidth is the maximum amount of information (counted in MB per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface within a second. It is calculated by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

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

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