GeForce GTS 250 1GB vs Radeon HD 7990

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 7990, which comes with core speeds of 950 MHz on the GPU, and 1500 MHz on the 3072 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 2048 SPUs along with 128 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 7990		375 Watts
	Difference: 230 Watts (159%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 7990 should be quite a bit faster than the GeForce GTS 250 1GB in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 7990		576000 MB/sec
GeForce GTS 250 1GB		70400 MB/sec
	Difference: 505600 (718%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7990 should be much (more or less 415%) faster with regards to AF than the GeForce GTS 250 1GB. (explain)

Radeon HD 7990		243200 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTS 250 1GB		47232 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 195968 (415%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 7990 will be a lot (more or less 415%) more effective at FSAA than the GeForce GTS 250 1GB, and should be able to handle higher resolutions more effectively. (explain)

Radeon HD 7990		60800 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTS 250 1GB		11808 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 48992 (415%)

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: Bandwidth is the max amount of data (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface in one second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core 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 in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics card can possibly write to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.