GeForce 9600 GSO 384MB vs Radeon HD 5830

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 5830, which uses a 40 nm design. AMD has set the core speed at 800 MHz. The GDDR5 memory is set to run at a frequency of 1000 MHz on this specific card. It features 1120(224x5) SPUs along with 56 Texture Address Units and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 9600 GSO 384MB		84 Watts
Radeon HD 5830		175 Watts
	Difference: 91 Watts (108%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 5830 will be 233% quicker than the GeForce 9600 GSO 384MB in general, due to its higher bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon HD 5830		128000 MB/sec
GeForce 9600 GSO 384MB		38400 MB/sec
	Difference: 89600 (233%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5830 will be quite a bit (about 70%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the GeForce 9600 GSO 384MB. (explain)

Radeon HD 5830		44800 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 9600 GSO 384MB		26400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 18400 (70%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 5830 is the winner, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon HD 5830		12800 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 9600 GSO 384MB		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: Bandwidth is the maximum amount of data (counted in MB per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface within a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher this number, 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 the graphics card could possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the core 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 rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.