GeForce 8800 GTS (G80) 320MB vs Radeon HD 5850

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 5850, which has core speeds of 725 MHz on the GPU, and 1000 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 1440(288x5) SPUs as well as 72 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 8800 GTS (G80) 320MB		143 Watts
Radeon HD 5850		151 Watts
	Difference: 8 Watts (6%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon HD 5850 should in theory be a lot better than the GeForce 8800 GTS (G80) 320MB overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 5850		128000 MB/sec
GeForce 8800 GTS (G80) 320MB		63360 MB/sec
	Difference: 64640 (102%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5850 will be quite a bit (more or less 112%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the GeForce 8800 GTS (G80) 320MB. (explain)

Radeon HD 5850		52200 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 8800 GTS (G80) 320MB		24624 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 27576 (112%)

Pixel Rate

If using lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon HD 5850 is a better choice, by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 5850		23200 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 8800 GTS (G80) 320MB		10260 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 12940 (126%)

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 maximum amount of information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface within a second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip could possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out 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 quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.