GeForce GTX 285 2GB vs Radeon HD 5830

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 5830, which features clock 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 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 5830		175 Watts
GeForce GTX 285 2GB		204 Watts
	Difference: 29 Watts (17%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the GeForce GTX 285 2GB should be a lot faster than the Radeon HD 5830 overall. (explain)

GeForce GTX 285 2GB		158976 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5830		128000 MB/sec
	Difference: 30976 (24%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 285 2GB is a little bit (more or less 16%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 5830. (explain)

GeForce GTX 285 2GB		51840 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5830		44800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 7040 (16%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 285 2GB is much (approximately 62%) better at full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 5830, and also should be capable of handling higher resolutions more effectively. (explain)

GeForce GTX 285 2GB		20736 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5830		12800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 7936 (62%)

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 (counted in megabytes per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface within a second. It is calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the bandwidth is, 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 in one second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the card will be at 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 record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of colour ROPs 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 many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.