GeForce GTS 250 512MB vs Radeon HD 6870

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 6870, which comes with core speeds of 900 MHz on the GPU, and 1050 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 1120 SPUs along with 56 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTS 250 512MB		145 Watts
Radeon HD 6870		151 Watts
	Difference: 6 Watts (4%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 6870 should perform a lot faster than the GeForce GTS 250 512MB overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 6870		134400 MB/sec
GeForce GTS 250 512MB		70400 MB/sec
	Difference: 64000 (91%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6870 is a small bit (approximately 7%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the GeForce GTS 250 512MB. (explain)

Radeon HD 6870		50400 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTS 250 512MB		47232 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 3168 (7%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6870 is a better choice, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 6870		28800 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTS 250 512MB		11808 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 16992 (144%)

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 max amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number 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 clock speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the graphics card could possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the amount 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 is also dependant on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.