GeForce GTS 250 1GB vs GeForce GTX 460 1GB

Intro

The GeForce GTS 250 1GB features a core clock speed of 738 MHz and a GDDR3 memory frequency of 1100 MHz. It also features a 256-bit memory bus, and uses a 65/55 nm design. It is comprised of 128 SPUs, 64 TAUs, and 16 ROPs.

Compare those specs to the GeForce GTX 460 1GB, which has clock speeds of 675 MHz on the GPU, and 900 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 336 SPUs along with 56 TAUs and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the largest amount of information (counted in MB per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in one second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are processed in one second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the graphics card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip can possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the clock 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 many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.