GeForce GT 230 vs Radeon HD 5830

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 5830, which features a GPU core clock speed of 800 MHz, and 1024 MB of GDDR5 memory running at 1000 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is comprised of 1120(224x5) SPUs, 56 Texture Address Units, and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GT 230		65 Watts
Radeon HD 5830		175 Watts
	Difference: 110 Watts (169%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon HD 5830 should theoretically be quite a bit superior to the GeForce GT 230 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 5830		128000 MB/sec
GeForce GT 230		38400 MB/sec
	Difference: 89600 (233%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5830 will be a lot (more or less 409%) better at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GT 230. (explain)

Radeon HD 5830		44800 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GT 230		8800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 36000 (409%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 5830 is superior to the GeForce GT 230, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon HD 5830		12800 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GT 230		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 data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface within a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core clock 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 processed in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount 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 calculated by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.