GeForce GTX 260 vs Radeon HD 5830

Intro

The GeForce GTX 260 features a clock speed of 576 MHz and a GDDR3 memory frequency of 999 MHz. It also makes use of a 448-bit bus, and uses a 65 nm design. It is made up of 192 SPUs, 64 Texture Address Units, and 28 Raster Operation Units.

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 5830, which has core 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 Rasterization Operator Units.

Price Comparison

Please note that the price comparisons are based on search keywords, and might not be the exact same card listed on this page. We have no control over the accuracy of their search results.

GeForce GTX 260 Amazon.com Other US-based stores Amazon.co.uk Amazon.de Amazon.fr

Radeon HD 5830 Amazon.com Other US-based stores Amazon.co.uk Amazon.de Amazon.fr

Specifications

Model	GeForce GTX 260	Radeon HD 5830
Manufacturer	nVidia	ATi
Year	June 16, 2008	February 25, 2010
Code Name	G200	Cypress LE
Fab Process	65 nm	40 nm
Bus	PCIe x16 2.0	PCIe 2.1 x16
Memory	896 MB	1024 MB
Core Speed	576 MHz	800 MHz
Shader Speed	1242 MHz	(N/A) MHz
Memory Speed	999 MHz	1000 MHz
Unified Shaders	192	1120(224x5)
Texture Mapping Units	64	56
Render Output Units	28	16
Bus Type	GDDR3	GDDR5
Bus Width	448-bit	256-bit
DirectX Version	DirectX 10	DirectX 11
OpenGL Version	OpenGL 3.1	OpenGL 3.2
Power (Max TDP)	182 watts	175 watts
Shader Model	4.0	5.0
Bandwidth	111888 MB/sec	128000 MB/sec
Texel Rate	36864 Mtexels/sec	44800 Mtexels/sec
Pixel Rate	16128 Mpixels/sec	12800 Mpixels/sec

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the largest amount of information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface within a second. It is calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card can possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.