GeForce GTS 250 512MB vs Radeon R9 390X 8G

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon R9 390X 8G, which comes with a GPU core clock speed of 1050 MHz, and 8192 MB of GDDR5 RAM running at 1500 MHz through a 512-bit bus. It also is comprised of 2816 Stream Processors, 176 Texture Address Units, and 64 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTS 250 512MB		145 Watts
Radeon R9 390X 8G		275 Watts
	Difference: 130 Watts (90%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon R9 390X 8G should in theory be much better than the GeForce GTS 250 512MB overall. (explain)

Radeon R9 390X 8G		384000 MB/sec
GeForce GTS 250 512MB		70400 MB/sec
	Difference: 313600 (445%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 390X 8G will be a lot (more or less 291%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTS 250 512MB. (explain)

Radeon R9 390X 8G		184800 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTS 250 512MB		47232 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 137568 (291%)

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon R9 390X 8G is the winner, by far. (explain)

Radeon R9 390X 8G		67200 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTS 250 512MB		11808 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 55392 (469%)

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 data (counted in MB per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in one second. It is calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the memory bandwidth, the better 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 per second. This is calculated by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the graphics card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card can possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel fill rate also depends on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.