GeForce GT 320 vs Radeon HD 5870

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 5870, which has a GPU core clock speed of 850 MHz, and 1024 MB of GDDR5 memory set to run at 1200 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is made up of 1600(320x5) SPUs, 80 Texture Address Units, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GT 320		43 Watts
Radeon HD 5870		188 Watts
	Difference: 145 Watts (337%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 5870 will be 508% faster than the GeForce GT 320 in general, due to its higher data rate. (explain)

Radeon HD 5870		153600 MB/sec
GeForce GT 320		25280 MB/sec
	Difference: 128320 (508%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5870 will be much (approximately 425%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the GeForce GT 320. (explain)

Radeon HD 5870		68000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GT 320		12960 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 55040 (425%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 5870 is the winner, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 5870		27200 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GT 320		4320 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 22880 (530%)

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 max amount of information (in units of MB per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in one second. It's calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the better 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 are applied per second. This is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics card could possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel output rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.