GeForce 9500 GT 1GB GDDR3 vs Radeon HD 5570

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 5570, which has GPU clock speed of 650 MHz, and 512 MB of DDR3 memory running at 900 MHz through a 128-bit bus. It also features 400(80x5) SPUs, 20 Texture Address Units, and 8 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 5570		43 Watts
GeForce 9500 GT 1GB GDDR3		50 Watts
	Difference: 7 Watts (16%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the Radeon HD 5570 should be a little bit faster than the GeForce 9500 GT 1GB GDDR3 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 5570		28800 MB/sec
GeForce 9500 GT 1GB GDDR3		25600 MB/sec
	Difference: 3200 (13%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5570 should be a lot (about 48%) more effective at texture filtering than the GeForce 9500 GT 1GB GDDR3. (explain)

Radeon HD 5570		13000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 9500 GT 1GB GDDR3		8800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 4200 (48%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 5570 is the winner, though not by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 5570		5200 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 9500 GT 1GB GDDR3		4400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 800 (18%)

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: Memory bandwidth is the max amount of information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in one second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed in one second. This is worked out by multiplying the total texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the video card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card could possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate 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 drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.