GeForce GTS 250 512MB vs Radeon HD 5870

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 5870, which uses a 40 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 850 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM runs at a frequency of 1200 MHz on this card. It features 1600(320x5) SPUs as well as 80 Texture Address Units 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 5870		188 Watts
	Difference: 43 Watts (30%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 5870 will be 118% quicker than the GeForce GTS 250 512MB overall, due to its higher data rate. (explain)

Radeon HD 5870		153600 MB/sec
GeForce GTS 250 512MB		70400 MB/sec
	Difference: 83200 (118%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5870 should be a lot (approximately 44%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTS 250 512MB. (explain)

Radeon HD 5870		68000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTS 250 512MB		47232 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 20768 (44%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 5870 is much (approximately 130%) faster with regards to full screen anti-aliasing than the GeForce GTS 250 512MB, and should be able to handle higher screen resolutions better. (explain)

Radeon HD 5870		27200 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTS 250 512MB		11808 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 15392 (130%)

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 (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in one second. It is calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the graphics card could possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to 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 reach the max fill rate.