GeForce GTX 260 vs Radeon HD 5830

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 5830, which comes with a GPU core clock speed of 800 MHz, and 1024 MB of GDDR5 memory set to run at 1000 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also features 1120(224x5) Stream Processors, 56 TAUs, and 16 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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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

In theory, the Radeon HD 5830 will be 14% quicker than the GeForce GTX 260 overall, 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 should be a lot (approximately 22%) better at 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

The GeForce GTX 260 will be quite a bit (approximately 26%) faster with regards to full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 5830, and will be able to handle higher resolutions without losing too much performance. (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 information (in units of MB per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This figure is worked out 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 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 the video card could possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.