GeForce GTX 260 Core 216 vs Radeon HD 5850

Intro

The GeForce GTX 260 Core 216 comes with a clock frequency of 576 MHz and a GDDR3 memory speed of 999 MHz. It also makes use of a 448-bit bus, and uses a 65 nm design. It is comprised of 216 SPUs, 72 TAUs, and 28 ROPs.

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 5850, which uses a 40 nm design. ATi has clocked the core frequency at 725 MHz. The GDDR5 memory runs at a speed of 1000 MHz on this specific model. It features 1440(288x5) SPUs as well as 72 TAUs and 32 ROPs.

Price Comparison

Please note that the price comparisons are based on search keywords, and might not be the exact same card listed on this page. We have no control over the accuracy of their search results.

GeForce GTX 260 Core 216 Amazon.com Other US-based stores Amazon.co.uk Amazon.de Amazon.fr

Radeon HD 5850 Amazon.com Other US-based stores Amazon.co.uk Amazon.de Amazon.fr

Specifications

Model	GeForce GTX 260 Core 216	Radeon HD 5850
Manufacturer	nVidia	ATi
Year	September 16, 2008	September 30, 2009
Code Name	G200	Cypress PRO
Fab Process	65 nm	40 nm
Bus	PCIe x16 2.0	PCIe 2.1 x16
Memory	896 MB	1024 MB
Core Speed	576 MHz	725 MHz
Shader Speed	1242 MHz	(N/A) MHz
Memory Speed	999 MHz	1000 MHz
Unified Shaders	216	1440(288x5)
Texture Mapping Units	72	72
Render Output Units	28	32
Bus Type	GDDR3	GDDR5
Bus Width	448-bit	256-bit
DirectX Version	DirectX 10	DirectX 11
OpenGL Version	OpenGL 3.1	OpenGL 3.2
Power (Max TDP)	202 watts	151 watts
Shader Model	4.0	5.0
Bandwidth	111888 MB/sec	128000 MB/sec
Texel Rate	41472 Mtexels/sec	52200 Mtexels/sec
Pixel Rate	16128 Mpixels/sec	23200 Mpixels/sec

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the largest amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface in a second. It's worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the memory bandwidth, the better 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 texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the video card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card could possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.