GeForce GTS 250 1GB vs Radeon HD 6950

Intro

The GeForce GTS 250 1GB makes use of a 65/55 nm design. nVidia has set the core frequency at 738 MHz. The GDDR3 RAM runs at a frequency of 1100 MHz on this particular model. It features 128 SPUs along with 64 Texture Address Units and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Compare that to the Radeon HD 6950, which comes with GPU clock speed of 800 MHz, and 1024 MB of GDDR5 memory running at 1250 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also features 1408 SPUs, 88 Texture Address Units, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the max amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in one second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the video 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 maximum amount of pixels that the graphics card can possibly write to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.