Geforce GTX 670 vs Radeon HD 5850

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 5850, which makes use of a 40 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 725 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM runs at a frequency of 1000 MHz on this particular model. It features 1440(288x5) SPUs along with 72 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

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

The Geforce GTX 670 should theoretically be a lot faster than the Radeon HD 5850 overall. (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 (about 96%) better at texture filtering 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 is quite a bit (about 26%) better at AA than the Radeon HD 5850, and also will be able to handle 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: Bandwidth is the max amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card can possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.