GeForce 9800 GTX+ vs Radeon HD 5830

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 5830, which comes with a core clock frequency of 800 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1000 MHz. It also makes use of a 256-bit memory bus, and makes use of a 40 nm design. It is comprised of 1120(224x5) SPUs, 56 Texture Address Units, and 16 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 9800 GTX+		145 Watts
Radeon HD 5830		175 Watts
	Difference: 30 Watts (21%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon HD 5830 should in theory be quite a bit better than the GeForce 9800 GTX+ in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 5830		128000 MB/sec
GeForce 9800 GTX+		70400 MB/sec
	Difference: 57600 (82%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce 9800 GTX+ is a little bit (approximately 5%) better at AF than the Radeon HD 5830. (explain)

GeForce 9800 GTX+		47232 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5830		44800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 2432 (5%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 5830 will be just a bit (about 8%) more effective at anti-aliasing than the GeForce 9800 GTX+, and able to handle higher resolutions better. (explain)

Radeon HD 5830		12800 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 9800 GTX+		11808 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 992 (8%)

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 largest amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in one second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the graphics card could possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate is also dependant on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.