GeForce GTS 250 512MB vs Radeon HD 6770

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 6770, which features core speeds of 900 MHz on the GPU, and 1050 MHz on the 512 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 800 SPUs along with 40 Texture Address Units and 16 ROPs.

(No game benchmarks for this combination yet.)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 6770		108 Watts
GeForce GTS 250 512MB		145 Watts
	Difference: 37 Watts (34%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the GeForce GTS 250 512MB should be 5% faster than the Radeon HD 6770 overall, because of its greater data rate. (explain)

GeForce GTS 250 512MB		70400 MB/sec
Radeon HD 6770		67200 MB/sec
	Difference: 3200 (5%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTS 250 512MB is much (approximately 31%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 6770. (explain)

GeForce GTS 250 512MB		47232 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6770		36000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 11232 (31%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 6770 is much (approximately 22%) better at AA than the GeForce GTS 250 512MB, and also should be able to handle higher resolutions better. (explain)

Radeon HD 6770		14400 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTS 250 512MB		11808 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 2592 (22%)

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 data (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface in a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, 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 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 clock speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the video 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 number of pixels that the graphics card could possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the core 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 ability to get to the maximum fill rate.