GeForce GTX 960 vs Radeon HD 5830

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 5830, which comes with clock speeds of 800 MHz on the GPU, and 1000 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 1120(224x5) SPUs along with 56 Texture Address Units and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 960		120 Watts
Radeon HD 5830		175 Watts
	Difference: 55 Watts (46%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 5830 is 14% quicker than the GeForce GTX 960 overall, due to its higher bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon HD 5830		128000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 960		112000 MB/sec
	Difference: 16000 (14%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 960 will be a lot (approximately 61%) better at AF than the Radeon HD 5830. (explain)

GeForce GTX 960		72128 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5830		44800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 27328 (61%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high screen resolution is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 960 is the winner, and very much so. (explain)

GeForce GTX 960		36064 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5830		12800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 23264 (182%)

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 maximum amount of information (in units of MB per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in a second. It is worked out by multiplying the interface width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.