GeForce GTX 280 vs Radeon HD 5830

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 5830, which uses a 40 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 800 MHz. The GDDR5 memory runs at a speed of 1000 MHz on this particular model. It features 1120(224x5) SPUs along with 56 TAUs and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 5830		175 Watts
GeForce GTX 280		236 Watts
	Difference: 61 Watts (35%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the GeForce GTX 280 should be a bit faster than the Radeon HD 5830 overall. (explain)

GeForce GTX 280		141696 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5830		128000 MB/sec
	Difference: 13696 (11%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 280 is a small bit (approximately 8%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the Radeon HD 5830. (explain)

GeForce GTX 280		48160 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5830		44800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 3360 (8%)

Pixel Rate

If running with lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 280 is the winner, and very much so. (explain)

GeForce GTX 280		19264 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5830		12800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 6464 (51%)

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 data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface within a second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the memory bandwidth, 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 number of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card can possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.