GeForce 9800 GT 1GB vs Radeon HD 5850

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 5850, which comes with core clock speeds of 725 MHz on the GPU, and 1000 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 1440(288x5) SPUs along with 72 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 9800 GT 1GB		105 Watts
Radeon HD 5850		151 Watts
	Difference: 46 Watts (44%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 5850 should in theory be much faster than the GeForce 9800 GT 1GB overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 5850		128000 MB/sec
GeForce 9800 GT 1GB		57600 MB/sec
	Difference: 70400 (122%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5850 will be quite a bit (approximately 55%) better at texture filtering than the GeForce 9800 GT 1GB. (explain)

Radeon HD 5850		52200 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 9800 GT 1GB		33600 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 18600 (55%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 5850 will be a lot (approximately 142%) more effective at FSAA than the GeForce 9800 GT 1GB, and also should be able to handle higher screen resolutions while still performing well. (explain)

Radeon HD 5850		23200 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 9800 GT 1GB		9600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 13600 (142%)

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: Memory bandwidth is the largest amount of data (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in one second. It is calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed in one second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total 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 maximum number of pixels that the graphics card could possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.