GeForce GTS 250 1GB vs Radeon HD 6970

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 6970, which has GPU clock speed of 880 MHz, and 2048 MB of GDDR5 RAM running at 1375 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is comprised of 1536 SPUs, 96 Texture Address Units, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTS 250 1GB		145 Watts
Radeon HD 6970		250 Watts
	Difference: 105 Watts (72%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 6970 is 150% quicker than the GeForce GTS 250 1GB overall, because of its higher data rate. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		176000 MB/sec
GeForce GTS 250 1GB		70400 MB/sec
	Difference: 105600 (150%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6970 should be much (more or less 79%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTS 250 1GB. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		84480 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTS 250 1GB		47232 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 37248 (79%)

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6970 is superior to the GeForce GTS 250 1GB, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		28160 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTS 250 1GB		11808 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 16352 (138%)

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 (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in one second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the 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 maximum amount of pixels that the graphics card can possibly record to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.