GeForce 9500 GT DDR2 vs Radeon HD 5830

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 5830, which has core clock speeds of 800 MHz on the GPU, and 1000 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 1120(224x5) SPUs as well as 56 Texture Address Units and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 9500 GT DDR2		50 Watts
Radeon HD 5830		175 Watts
	Difference: 125 Watts (250%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the Radeon HD 5830 should be much faster than the GeForce 9500 GT DDR2 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 5830		128000 MB/sec
GeForce 9500 GT DDR2		16000 MB/sec
	Difference: 112000 (700%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5830 is much (approximately 409%) more effective at AF than the GeForce 9500 GT DDR2. (explain)

Radeon HD 5830		44800 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 9500 GT DDR2		8800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 36000 (409%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 5830 will be much (about 191%) better at FSAA than the GeForce 9500 GT DDR2, and should be capable of handling higher screen resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

Radeon HD 5830		12800 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 9500 GT DDR2		4400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 8400 (191%)

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 (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface within a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics card can possibly write to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the core clock speed. 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 also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.