GeForce 8800 GTS (G80) 320MB vs Radeon HD 5770

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 5770, which makes use of a 40 nm design. AMD has set the core speed at 850 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM works at a speed of 1200 MHz on this card. It features 800(160x5) SPUs as well as 40 TAUs and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 5770		108 Watts
GeForce 8800 GTS (G80) 320MB		143 Watts
	Difference: 35 Watts (32%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon HD 5770 should theoretically be much better than the GeForce 8800 GTS (G80) 320MB overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 5770		76800 MB/sec
GeForce 8800 GTS (G80) 320MB		63360 MB/sec
	Difference: 13440 (21%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5770 will be quite a bit (more or less 38%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce 8800 GTS (G80) 320MB. (explain)

Radeon HD 5770		34000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 8800 GTS (G80) 320MB		24624 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 9376 (38%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 5770 is a better choice, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 5770		13600 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 8800 GTS (G80) 320MB		10260 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 3340 (33%)

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 max amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface in a second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip can possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.