GeForce 9800 GT 1GB vs Radeon HD 5830

Intro

The GeForce 9800 GT 1GB uses a 65/55 nm design. nVidia has clocked the core speed at 600 MHz. The GDDR3 memory works at a frequency of 900 MHz on this particular card. It features 112 SPUs as well as 56 TAUs and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 5830, which has GPU core speed of 800 MHz, and 1024 MB of GDDR5 memory set to run at 1000 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is made up of 1120(224x5) SPUs, 56 TAUs, and 16 ROPs.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the maximum amount of information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in one second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the better 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed in one second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the graphics card will be at 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 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 ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends 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.