GeForce GTS 250 1GB vs Radeon HD 6990

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 6990, which makes use of a 40 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 830 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM works at a speed of 1250 MHz on this model. It features 1536 SPUs as well as 96 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTS 250 1GB		145 Watts
Radeon HD 6990		375 Watts
	Difference: 230 Watts (159%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 6990 should in theory be a lot faster than the GeForce GTS 250 1GB in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 6990		320000 MB/sec
GeForce GTS 250 1GB		70400 MB/sec
	Difference: 249600 (355%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6990 is quite a bit (approximately 237%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTS 250 1GB. (explain)

Radeon HD 6990		159360 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTS 250 1GB		47232 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 112128 (237%)

Pixel Rate

If using lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6990 is the winner, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon HD 6990		53120 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTS 250 1GB		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 maximum amount of information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in one second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the better 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 can be applied in one second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the graphics card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the video card could possibly record to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the core 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 fill rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.