GeForce GTS 250 512MB vs Radeon HD 6990

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 6990, which comes with core clock speeds of 830 MHz on the GPU, and 1250 MHz on the 2048 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 1536 SPUs as well as 96 TAUs and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTS 250 512MB		145 Watts
Radeon HD 6990		375 Watts
	Difference: 230 Watts (159%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 6990 should perform much faster than the GeForce GTS 250 512MB in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 6990		320000 MB/sec
GeForce GTS 250 512MB		70400 MB/sec
	Difference: 249600 (355%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6990 will be much (about 237%) better at AF than the GeForce GTS 250 512MB. (explain)

Radeon HD 6990		159360 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTS 250 512MB		47232 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 112128 (237%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6990 is superior to the GeForce GTS 250 512MB, by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 6990		53120 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTS 250 512MB		11808 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 41312 (350%)

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.

One or more cards in this comparison are multi-core. This means that their bandwidth, texel and pixel rates are theoretically doubled - this does not mean the card will actually perform twice as fast, but only that it should in theory be able to. Actual game benchmarks will give a more accurate idea of what it's capable of.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the largest amount of data (measured in megabytes per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in one second. The number is calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, 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 calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the video card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the graphics card could possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes 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, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.