GeForce GTX 980 vs Radeon HD 5850

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 5850, which comes with clock 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 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 5850		151 Watts
GeForce GTX 980		165 Watts
	Difference: 14 Watts (9%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the GeForce GTX 980 should be 75% quicker than the Radeon HD 5850 overall, due to its greater bandwidth. (explain)

GeForce GTX 980		224000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5850		128000 MB/sec
	Difference: 96000 (75%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 980 should be quite a bit (approximately 176%) faster with regards to AF than the Radeon HD 5850. (explain)

GeForce GTX 980		144128 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5850		52200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 91928 (176%)

Pixel Rate

If using lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 980 is the winner, and very much so. (explain)

GeForce GTX 980		72064 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5850		23200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 48864 (211%)

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 max amount of information (in units of MB per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface within 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 must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be processed 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 higher the texel rate, the better the video card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics card can possibly write to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.