GeForce 9800 GT 512MB vs Radeon HD 5770

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 5770, which uses a 40 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 850 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM is set to run at a speed of 1200 MHz on this specific card. It features 800(160x5) SPUs as well as 40 TAUs and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 9800 GT 512MB		105 Watts
Radeon HD 5770		108 Watts
	Difference: 3 Watts (3%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 5770 should be 33% quicker than the GeForce 9800 GT 512MB overall, due to its higher bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon HD 5770		76800 MB/sec
GeForce 9800 GT 512MB		57600 MB/sec
	Difference: 19200 (33%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5770 is a small bit (about 1%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the GeForce 9800 GT 512MB. (explain)

Radeon HD 5770		34000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 9800 GT 512MB		33600 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 400 (1%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 5770 should be quite a bit (about 42%) more effective at FSAA than the GeForce 9800 GT 512MB, and should be capable of handling higher resolutions better. (explain)

Radeon HD 5770		13600 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 9800 GT 512MB		9600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 4000 (42%)

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 (counted in MB per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in one second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the graphics card could possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel fill rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.