GeForce GTX 285 1GB vs Radeon HD 5830

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 5830, which comes with core speeds of 800 MHz on the GPU, and 1000 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 1120(224x5) SPUs as well as 56 Texture Address Units and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 5830		175 Watts
GeForce GTX 285 1GB		204 Watts
	Difference: 29 Watts (17%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the GeForce GTX 285 1GB is 24% quicker than the Radeon HD 5830 overall, because of its greater data rate. (explain)

GeForce GTX 285 1GB		158976 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5830		128000 MB/sec
	Difference: 30976 (24%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 285 1GB should be a bit (more or less 16%) better at AF than the Radeon HD 5830. (explain)

GeForce GTX 285 1GB		51840 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5830		44800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 7040 (16%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 285 1GB is superior to the Radeon HD 5830, by a large margin. (explain)

GeForce GTX 285 1GB		20736 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5830		12800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 7936 (62%)

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 megabytes per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the better 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 are applied per second. This 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 graphics 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 card can possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill 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.