GeForce GTS 250 512MB vs Radeon HD 4830 512MB

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 4830 512MB, which makes use of a 55 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 575 MHz. The GDDR3 memory works at a speed of 900 MHz on this specific card. It features 640(128x5) SPUs along with 32 Texture Address Units and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 4830 512MB		95 Watts
GeForce GTS 250 512MB		145 Watts
	Difference: 50 Watts (53%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the GeForce GTS 250 512MB should perform a lot faster than the Radeon HD 4830 512MB in general. (explain)

GeForce GTS 250 512MB		70400 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4830 512MB		57600 MB/sec
	Difference: 12800 (22%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTS 250 512MB is quite a bit (about 157%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 4830 512MB. (explain)

GeForce GTS 250 512MB		47232 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4830 512MB		18400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 28832 (157%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTS 250 512MB is much (about 28%) more effective at FSAA than the Radeon HD 4830 512MB, and also will be capable of handling higher screen resolutions better. (explain)

GeForce GTS 250 512MB		11808 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4830 512MB		9200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 2608 (28%)

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 megabytes per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface within a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total 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 texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the graphics card could possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. 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 ability to get to the maximum fill rate.