GeForce GTS 250 1GB vs Radeon HD 6770

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 6770, which features a GPU core clock speed of 900 MHz, and 512 MB of GDDR5 RAM set to run at 1050 MHz through a 128-bit bus. It also features 800 SPUs, 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 1GB		145 Watts
	Difference: 37 Watts (34%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the GeForce GTS 250 1GB should be 5% quicker than the Radeon HD 6770 in general, due to its higher bandwidth. (explain)

GeForce GTS 250 1GB		70400 MB/sec
Radeon HD 6770		67200 MB/sec
	Difference: 3200 (5%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTS 250 1GB should be much (more or less 31%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 6770. (explain)

GeForce GTS 250 1GB		47232 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6770		36000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 11232 (31%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 6770 should be quite a bit (approximately 22%) faster with regards to AA than the GeForce GTS 250 1GB, and also will be able to handle higher resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

Radeon HD 6770		14400 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTS 250 1GB		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: Memory bandwidth is the maximum amount of data (in units of MB per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface within a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's memory bandwidth, 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 applied per second. This is worked out by multiplying the total number 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 in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most 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 amount of Render Output Units by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.