GeForce GTS 250 512MB vs Radeon HD 4830 1GB

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 4830 1GB, which features clock speeds of 575 MHz on the GPU, and 900 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR4 RAM. It features 640(128x5) SPUs along with 32 Texture Address Units and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 4830 1GB		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 1GB in general. (explain)

GeForce GTS 250 512MB		70400 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4830 1GB		57600 MB/sec
	Difference: 12800 (22%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTS 250 512MB should be quite a bit (approximately 157%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 4830 1GB. (explain)

GeForce GTS 250 512MB		47232 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4830 1GB		18400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 28832 (157%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTS 250 512MB should be quite a bit (about 28%) more effective at anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 4830 1GB, and also should be capable of handling higher screen resolutions better. (explain)

GeForce GTS 250 512MB		11808 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4830 1GB		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 max amount of data (measured in megabytes per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in one second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR type RAM, it 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 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 worked out 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 graphics 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 amount of pixels that the graphics card could possibly record to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.