GeForce 8800 Ultra vs Radeon HD 5830

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 5830, which comes with a GPU core clock speed of 800 MHz, and 1024 MB of GDDR5 RAM set to run at 1000 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also features 1120(224x5) Stream Processors, 56 Texture Address Units, and 16 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 8800 Ultra		171 Watts
Radeon HD 5830		175 Watts
	Difference: 4 Watts (2%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 5830, in theory, should be quite a bit faster than the GeForce 8800 Ultra in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 5830		128000 MB/sec
GeForce 8800 Ultra		103680 MB/sec
	Difference: 24320 (23%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5830 will be a bit (more or less 14%) better at AF than the GeForce 8800 Ultra. (explain)

Radeon HD 5830		44800 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 8800 Ultra		39168 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 5632 (14%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high screen resolution is important to you, then the GeForce 8800 Ultra is the winner, but only just. (explain)

GeForce 8800 Ultra		14688 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5830		12800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 1888 (15%)

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 moved across the external memory interface in one second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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

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