GeForce GT 320 vs Radeon HD 5850

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 5850, which comes with core clock speeds of 725 MHz on the GPU, and 1000 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 1440(288x5) SPUs along with 72 TAUs and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GT 320		43 Watts
Radeon HD 5850		151 Watts
	Difference: 108 Watts (251%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 5850 is 406% faster than the GeForce GT 320 overall, due to its greater bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon HD 5850		128000 MB/sec
GeForce GT 320		25280 MB/sec
	Difference: 102720 (406%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5850 should be much (about 303%) better at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GT 320. (explain)

Radeon HD 5850		52200 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GT 320		12960 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 39240 (303%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 5850 is much (about 437%) better at FSAA than the GeForce GT 320, and also able to handle higher screen resolutions more effectively. (explain)

Radeon HD 5850		23200 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GT 320		4320 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 18880 (437%)

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 (counted in MB per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface within a second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The better this number, 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 in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the the core 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 of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.