GeForce GTS 250 1GB vs Radeon HD 4850 1GB

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 4850 1GB, which has a GPU core clock speed of 625 MHz, and 1024 MB of GDDR4 RAM running at 993 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is made up of 800(160x5) Stream Processors, 40 Texture Address Units, and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 4850 1GB		110 Watts
GeForce GTS 250 1GB		145 Watts
	Difference: 35 Watts (32%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the GeForce GTS 250 1GB should perform a little bit faster than the Radeon HD 4850 1GB overall. (explain)

GeForce GTS 250 1GB		70400 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4850 1GB		63552 MB/sec
	Difference: 6848 (11%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTS 250 1GB should be a lot (about 89%) more effective at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 4850 1GB. (explain)

GeForce GTS 250 1GB		47232 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4850 1GB		25000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 22232 (89%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high resolution is important to you, then the GeForce GTS 250 1GB is superior to the Radeon HD 4850 1GB, though only just barely. (explain)

GeForce GTS 250 1GB		11808 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4850 1GB		10000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 1808 (18%)

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 (counted in MB per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in a second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the video card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics card can 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 Render Output Units by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.