GeForce GTS 250 512MB vs Radeon HD 4830 512MB

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 4830 512MB, which comes with core speeds of 575 MHz on the GPU, and 900 MHz on the 512 MB of GDDR3 RAM. It features 640(128x5) SPUs along with 32 TAUs and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 4830 512MB		95 Watts
GeForce GTS 250 512MB		145 Watts
	Difference: 50 Watts (53%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the GeForce GTS 250 512MB should theoretically be quite a bit better than the Radeon HD 4830 512MB in general. (explain)

GeForce GTS 250 512MB		70400 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4830 512MB		57600 MB/sec
	Difference: 12800 (22%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTS 250 512MB is a lot (more or less 157%) better at AF than the Radeon HD 4830 512MB. (explain)

GeForce GTS 250 512MB		47232 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4830 512MB		18400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 28832 (157%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high screen resolution is important to you, then the GeForce GTS 250 512MB is a better choice, and very much so. (explain)

GeForce GTS 250 512MB		11808 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4830 512MB		9200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 2608 (28%)

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 information (counted in MB per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied in one second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the video card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics card can possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.