GeForce GTS 250 512MB vs Radeon HD 5830

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 5830, which has core speeds of 800 MHz on the GPU, and 1000 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 1120(224x5) SPUs as well as 56 Texture Address Units and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTS 250 512MB		145 Watts
Radeon HD 5830		175 Watts
	Difference: 30 Watts (21%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 5830 will be 82% quicker than the GeForce GTS 250 512MB overall, because of its greater bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon HD 5830		128000 MB/sec
GeForce GTS 250 512MB		70400 MB/sec
	Difference: 57600 (82%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTS 250 512MB should be a small bit (approximately 5%) more effective at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 5830. (explain)

GeForce GTS 250 512MB		47232 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5830		44800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 2432 (5%)

Pixel Rate

If running with lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon HD 5830 is a better choice, but not by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 5830		12800 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTS 250 512MB		11808 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 992 (8%)

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 maximum amount of information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface within a second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card could possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel 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.