GeForce 9600 GSO 512MB vs Radeon HD 5830

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 5830, which has a clock frequency of 800 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1000 MHz. It also uses a 256-bit memory bus, and makes use of a 40 nm design. It features 1120(224x5) SPUs, 56 TAUs, and 16 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 9600 GSO 512MB		90 Watts
Radeon HD 5830		175 Watts
	Difference: 85 Watts (94%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 5830 should perform much faster than the GeForce 9600 GSO 512MB overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 5830		128000 MB/sec
GeForce 9600 GSO 512MB		57600 MB/sec
	Difference: 70400 (122%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5830 will be much (approximately 44%) better at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce 9600 GSO 512MB. (explain)

Radeon HD 5830		44800 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 9600 GSO 512MB		31200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 13600 (44%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 5830 will be much (about 23%) more effective at AA than the GeForce 9600 GSO 512MB, and able to handle higher resolutions more effectively. (explain)

Radeon HD 5830		12800 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 9600 GSO 512MB		10400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 2400 (23%)

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 (measured in MB per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics card could possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called 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 reach the maximum fill rate.