GeForce 9600 GSO ASUS 512 vs Radeon HD 5830

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 5830, which features GPU clock 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.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 9600 GSO ASUS 512		84 Watts
Radeon HD 5830		175 Watts
	Difference: 91 Watts (108%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 5830 will be 700% faster than the GeForce 9600 GSO ASUS 512 overall, due to its higher bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon HD 5830		128000 MB/sec
GeForce 9600 GSO ASUS 512		16000 MB/sec
	Difference: 112000 (700%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5830 will be quite a bit (more or less 70%) better at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce 9600 GSO ASUS 512. (explain)

Radeon HD 5830		44800 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 9600 GSO ASUS 512		26400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 18400 (70%)

Pixel Rate

If using lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon HD 5830 is a better choice, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon HD 5830		12800 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 9600 GSO ASUS 512		6600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 6200 (94%)

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 maximum amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the memory bandwidth, 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 number of texture map elements (texels) that are processed in one second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the graphics card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics card could possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.