Geforce GTX 670 vs Radeon HD 5850

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 5850, which features 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)

Radeon HD 5850		151 Watts
Geforce GTX 670		170 Watts
	Difference: 19 Watts (13%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Geforce GTX 670 should theoretically be much better than the Radeon HD 5850 in general. (explain)

Geforce GTX 670		192000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5850		128000 MB/sec
	Difference: 64000 (50%)

Texel Rate

The Geforce GTX 670 should be much (more or less 96%) more effective at AF than the Radeon HD 5850. (explain)

Geforce GTX 670		102480 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5850		52200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 50280 (96%)

Pixel Rate

The Geforce GTX 670 should be quite a bit (approximately 26%) more effective at anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 5850, and also capable of handling higher screen resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

Geforce GTX 670		29280 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5850		23200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 6080 (26%)

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 (in units of MB per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the video card can possibly record to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.