GeForce GTS 250 1GB vs Radeon HD 6850

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 6850, which uses a 40 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 775 MHz. The GDDR5 memory works at a speed of 1000 MHz on this card. It features 960 SPUs as well as 48 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 6850		127 Watts
GeForce GTS 250 1GB		145 Watts
	Difference: 18 Watts (14%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 6850 should be 82% faster than the GeForce GTS 250 1GB in general, due to its higher data rate. (explain)

Radeon HD 6850		128000 MB/sec
GeForce GTS 250 1GB		70400 MB/sec
	Difference: 57600 (82%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTS 250 1GB is a lot (approximately 27%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the Radeon HD 6850. (explain)

GeForce GTS 250 1GB		47232 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6850		37200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 10032 (27%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6850 is a better choice, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon HD 6850		24800 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTS 250 1GB		11808 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 12992 (110%)

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 largest amount of data (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface within a second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 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 anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card can possibly write to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the core 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 quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.