GeForce GTX 260 vs Radeon HD 5830

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 5830, which makes use of a 40 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 800 MHz. The GDDR5 memory is set to run at a frequency of 1000 MHz on this particular card. It features 1120(224x5) SPUs as well as 56 TAUs and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 5830		175 Watts
GeForce GTX 260		182 Watts
	Difference: 7 Watts (4%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 5830 is 14% quicker than the GeForce GTX 260 in general, due to its greater data rate. (explain)

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

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5830 is a lot (about 22%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTX 260. (explain)

Radeon HD 5830		44800 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 260		36864 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 7936 (22%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high resolution is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 260 is superior to the Radeon HD 5830, by a large margin. (explain)

GeForce GTX 260		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 (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface within a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip can possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out 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 also depends on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.