GeForce 8500 GT vs Radeon HD 5670

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 5670, which comes with a clock frequency of 775 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1000 MHz. It also uses a 128-bit bus, and makes use of a 40 nm design. It is comprised of 400(80x5) SPUs, 20 Texture Address Units, and 8 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 8500 GT		45 Watts
Radeon HD 5670		61 Watts
	Difference: 16 Watts (36%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 5670 should in theory perform quite a bit faster than the GeForce 8500 GT overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 5670		64000 MB/sec
GeForce 8500 GT		12800 MB/sec
	Difference: 51200 (400%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5670 will be a lot (about 331%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the GeForce 8500 GT. (explain)

Radeon HD 5670		15500 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 8500 GT		3600 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 11900 (331%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 5670 should be quite a bit (approximately 244%) more effective at anti-aliasing than the GeForce 8500 GT, and capable of handling higher screen resolutions while still performing well. (explain)

Radeon HD 5670		6200 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 8500 GT		1800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 4400 (244%)

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 maximum amount of information (counted in MB per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface in a second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the graphics card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the graphics card can possibly write to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the core 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 output rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.