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GeForce 9800 GTX vs Radeon HD 5850

Intro

The GeForce 9800 GTX makes use of a 65 nm design. nVidia has clocked the core speed at 675 MHz. The GDDR3 memory runs at a frequency of 1100 MHz on this particular model. It features 128 SPUs along with 64 TAUs and 16 ROPs.

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 5850, which comes with GPU clock speed of 725 MHz, and 1024 MB of GDDR5 RAM running at 1000 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is comprised of 1440(288x5) SPUs, 72 TAUs, and 32 ROPs.

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 9800 GTX 140 Watts
Radeon HD 5850 151 Watts
Difference: 11 Watts (8%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 5850 will be 82% quicker than the GeForce 9800 GTX overall, due to its greater bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon HD 5850 128000 MB/sec
GeForce 9800 GTX 70400 MB/sec
Difference: 57600 (82%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5850 will be quite a bit (more or less 21%) better at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce 9800 GTX. (explain)

Radeon HD 5850 52200 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 9800 GTX 43200 Mtexels/sec
Difference: 9000 (21%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 5850 is superior to the GeForce 9800 GTX, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 5850 23200 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 9800 GTX 10800 Mpixels/sec
Difference: 12400 (115%)

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

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GeForce 9800 GTX

Amazon.com

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Radeon HD 5850

Amazon.com

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Please note that the price comparisons are based on search keywords - sometimes it might show cards with very similar names that are not exactly the same as the one chosen in the comparison. We do try to filter out the wrong results as best we can, though.

Specifications

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Model GeForce 9800 GTX Radeon HD 5850
Manufacturer nVidia AMD
Year April 2008 September 30, 2009
Code Name G92 Cypress PRO
Memory 512 MB 1024 MB
Core Speed 675 MHz 725 MHz
Memory Speed 2200 MHz 4000 MHz
Power (Max TDP) 140 watts 151 watts
Bandwidth 70400 MB/sec 128000 MB/sec
Texel Rate 43200 Mtexels/sec 52200 Mtexels/sec
Pixel Rate 10800 Mpixels/sec 23200 Mpixels/sec
Unified Shaders 128 1440(288x5)
Texture Mapping Units 64 72
Render Output Units 16 32
Bus Type GDDR3 GDDR5
Bus Width 256-bit 256-bit
Fab Process 65 nm 40 nm
Transistors 754 million 2154 million
Bus PCIe x16 2.0 PCIe 2.1 x16
DirectX Version DirectX 10 DirectX 11
OpenGL Version OpenGL 3.0 OpenGL 3.2

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the maximum amount of information (counted in MB per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface within a second. It's calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the bandwidth is, the better 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 is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, 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 can possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.

Display Prices

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GeForce 9800 GTX

Amazon.com

Check prices at:

Radeon HD 5850

Amazon.com

Check prices at:

Please note that the price comparisons are based on search keywords - sometimes it might show cards with very similar names that are not exactly the same as the one chosen in the comparison. We do try to filter out the wrong results as best we can, though.

Comments

One Response to “GeForce 9800 GTX vs Radeon HD 5850”
Good enough for BF3? - Electronic Arts UK Community says:

[...] I though it scales to a similar point in performance as the 9800. Here's a simple comparisson. GeForce 9800 GTX vs Radeon HD 5850 – Performance Comparison Benchmarks @ Hardware Compare [...]

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