GeForce GTS 250 512MB vs Radeon HD 5770

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 5770, which features a GPU core clock speed of 850 MHz, and 1024 MB of GDDR5 RAM set to run at 1200 MHz through a 128-bit bus. It also features 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 5770		108 Watts
GeForce GTS 250 512MB		145 Watts
	Difference: 37 Watts (34%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon HD 5770 should in theory be a small bit superior to the GeForce GTS 250 512MB in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 5770		76800 MB/sec
GeForce GTS 250 512MB		70400 MB/sec
	Difference: 6400 (9%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTS 250 512MB should be a lot (more or less 39%) more effective at AF than the Radeon HD 5770. (explain)

GeForce GTS 250 512MB		47232 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5770		34000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 13232 (39%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 5770 is the winner, though not by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 5770		13600 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTS 250 512MB		11808 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 1792 (15%)

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 largest amount of information (in units of MB per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface within a second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied in one second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the video 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 that the graphics card can possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.