GeForce GTX 295 vs Radeon HD 5870

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 5870, which comes with a core clock speed of 850 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1200 MHz. It also uses a 256-bit memory bus, and uses a 40 nm design. It features 1600(320x5) SPUs, 80 Texture Address Units, and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 5870		188 Watts
GeForce GTX 295		289 Watts
	Difference: 101 Watts (54%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the GeForce GTX 295 should be quite a bit faster than the Radeon HD 5870 overall. (explain)

GeForce GTX 295		223776 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5870		153600 MB/sec
	Difference: 70176 (46%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 295 will be quite a bit (more or less 36%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 5870. (explain)

GeForce GTX 295		92160 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5870		68000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 24160 (36%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 295 is a better choice, not by a very large margin though. (explain)

GeForce GTX 295		32256 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5870		27200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 5056 (19%)

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.

One or more cards in this comparison are multi-core. This means that their bandwidth, texel and pixel rates are theoretically doubled - this does not mean the card will actually perform twice as fast, but only that it should in theory be able to. Actual game benchmarks will give a more accurate idea of what it's capable of.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the largest amount of information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in one second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed in one second. This number 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 handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the video 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 colour ROPs by the the core clock speed. 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 lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.