GeForce GT 1030 vs Radeon HD 5850

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 5850, which features a clock frequency of 725 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1000 MHz. It also features a 256-bit memory bus, and makes use of a 40 nm design. It is made up of 1440(288x5) SPUs, 72 Texture Address Units, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GT 1030		30 Watts
Radeon HD 5850		151 Watts
	Difference: 121 Watts (403%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the Radeon HD 5850 should perform much faster than the GeForce GT 1030 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 5850		128000 MB/sec
GeForce GT 1030		49152 MB/sec
	Difference: 78848 (160%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5850 is quite a bit (approximately 29%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the GeForce GT 1030. (explain)

Radeon HD 5850		52200 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GT 1030		40480 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 11720 (29%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 5850 will be a small bit (about 15%) better at anti-aliasing than the GeForce GT 1030, and capable of handling higher resolutions while still performing well. (explain)

Radeon HD 5850		23200 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GT 1030		20240 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 2960 (15%)

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 (in units of MB per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in one second. It's calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics chip can possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called 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, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.