GeForce GTX 260 Core 216 vs Radeon HD 5830

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 5830, which has a clock speed of 800 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1000 MHz. It also uses a 256-bit bus, and uses a 40 nm design. It is made up of 1120(224x5) SPUs, 56 Texture Address Units, and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 5830		175 Watts
GeForce GTX 260 Core 216		202 Watts
	Difference: 27 Watts (15%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 5830, in theory, should perform just a bit faster than the GeForce GTX 260 Core 216 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 5830		128000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 260 Core 216		111888 MB/sec
	Difference: 16112 (14%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5830 is a little bit (about 8%) faster with regards to AF than the GeForce GTX 260 Core 216. (explain)

Radeon HD 5830		44800 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 260 Core 216		41472 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 3328 (8%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high screen resolution is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 260 Core 216 is a better choice, and very much so. (explain)

GeForce GTX 260 Core 216		16128 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5830		12800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 3328 (26%)

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 largest amount of data (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in one second. It is calculated by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR type memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip could possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.