GeForce GTS 250 512MB vs Radeon HD 4850 2GB

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 4850 2GB, which has GPU core speed of 625 MHz, and 2048 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 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 4850 2GB		110 Watts
GeForce GTS 250 512MB		145 Watts
	Difference: 35 Watts (32%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the GeForce GTS 250 512MB should theoretically be a little bit superior to the Radeon HD 4850 2GB overall. (explain)

GeForce GTS 250 512MB		70400 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4850 2GB		63552 MB/sec
	Difference: 6848 (11%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTS 250 512MB will be quite a bit (more or less 89%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 4850 2GB. (explain)

GeForce GTS 250 512MB		47232 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4850 2GB		25000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 22232 (89%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high screen resolution is important to you, then the GeForce GTS 250 512MB is a better choice, though not by far. (explain)

GeForce GTS 250 512MB		11808 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4850 2GB		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 maximum amount of information (counted in MB per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface in a second. It is calculated by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR type memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total texture units 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 applied in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card could possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of ROPs 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 lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.