GeForce GTS 150 vs Radeon HD 5830

Intro

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

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTS 150		141 Watts
Radeon HD 5830		175 Watts
	Difference: 34 Watts (24%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon HD 5830 should in theory be quite a bit superior to the GeForce GTS 150 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 5830		128000 MB/sec
GeForce GTS 150		32000 MB/sec
	Difference: 96000 (300%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTS 150 is just a bit (approximately 6%) more effective at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 5830. (explain)

GeForce GTS 150		47360 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5830		44800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 2560 (6%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 5830 will be a little bit (more or less 8%) more effective at full screen anti-aliasing than the GeForce GTS 150, and also should be able to handle higher screen resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

Radeon HD 5830		12800 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTS 150		11840 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 960 (8%)

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 maximum amount of information (measured in MB per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface within a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the faster 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 are applied per second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the graphics 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 could possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the the card's clock speed. 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 - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.