GeForce GTS 250 512MB vs Radeon HD 7850

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 7850, which has core speeds of 860 MHz on the GPU, and 1200 MHz on the 2048 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 1024 SPUs as well as 64 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 7850		130 Watts
GeForce GTS 250 512MB		145 Watts
	Difference: 15 Watts (12%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 7850 should be 118% quicker than the GeForce GTS 250 512MB in general, due to its higher data rate. (explain)

Radeon HD 7850		153600 MB/sec
GeForce GTS 250 512MB		70400 MB/sec
	Difference: 83200 (118%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7850 is a small bit (about 17%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTS 250 512MB. (explain)

Radeon HD 7850		55040 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTS 250 512MB		47232 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 7808 (17%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 7850 should be a lot (about 133%) better at full screen anti-aliasing than the GeForce GTS 250 512MB, and will be capable of handling higher resolutions more effectively. (explain)

Radeon HD 7850		27520 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTS 250 512MB		11808 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 15712 (133%)

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: Memory bandwidth is the largest amount of information (counted in MB per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in a second. It is calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better 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 texture map elements (texels) that can be applied 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 better this number, the better the card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics card could possibly write to the local memory per 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 - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant 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.