GeForce GTX 285 2GB vs Radeon HD 5830

Intro

The GeForce GTX 285 2GB makes use of a 55 nm design. nVidia has set the core frequency at 648 MHz. The GDDR3 RAM is set to run at a frequency of 1242 MHz on this specific model. It features 240 SPUs along with 80 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator 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 as well as 56 TAUs and 16 ROPs.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the largest amount of data (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface in one second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the video card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the graphics card can possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of Render Output Units 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 quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.