GeForce 9600 GT 1GB vs Radeon HD 5850

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 5850, which has a GPU core clock speed of 725 MHz, and 1024 MB of GDDR5 memory running at 1000 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is made up of 1440(288x5) Stream Processors, 72 TAUs, and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 9600 GT 1GB		95 Watts
Radeon HD 5850		151 Watts
	Difference: 56 Watts (59%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon HD 5850 should theoretically be a lot superior to the GeForce 9600 GT 1GB in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 5850		128000 MB/sec
GeForce 9600 GT 1GB		57600 MB/sec
	Difference: 70400 (122%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5850 will be a lot (more or less 151%) better at texture filtering than the GeForce 9600 GT 1GB. (explain)

Radeon HD 5850		52200 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 9600 GT 1GB		20800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 31400 (151%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 5850 should be quite a bit (about 123%) more effective at full screen anti-aliasing than the GeForce 9600 GT 1GB, and also will be capable of handling higher screen resolutions better. (explain)

Radeon HD 5850		23200 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 9600 GT 1GB		10400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 12800 (123%)

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 largest amount of data (measured in megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in a second. It is worked out by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the bandwidth is, the faster 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 per second. This is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the graphics 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 that the graphics chip could possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core speed of the card. 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 many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.