GeForce GTS 250 1GB vs GeForce GTX 460 1GB

Intro

The GeForce GTS 250 1GB features a GPU clock speed of 738 MHz, and the 1024 MB of GDDR3 memory runs at 1100 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is comprised of 128 Stream Processors, 64 Texture Address Units, and 16 ROPs.

Compare all that to the GeForce GTX 460 1GB, which has core clock speeds of 675 MHz on the GPU, and 900 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 336 SPUs along with 56 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the largest amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface within a second. It's calculated by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the 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 texture map elements (texels) that are processed in one second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the video 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 most pixels that the graphics card could possibly write to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output 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.