GeForce 8800 GTX vs Radeon HD 5830

Intro

Compare all of that 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 memory. It features 1120(224x5) SPUs as well as 56 Texture Address Units and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 8800 GTX		155 Watts
Radeon HD 5830		175 Watts
	Difference: 20 Watts (13%)

Memory Bandwidth

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

Radeon HD 5830		128000 MB/sec
GeForce 8800 GTX		86400 MB/sec
	Difference: 41600 (48%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5830 is much (about 22%) better at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce 8800 GTX. (explain)

Radeon HD 5830		44800 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 8800 GTX		36800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 8000 (22%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high resolution is important to you, then the GeForce 8800 GTX is a better choice, but it probably won't make a huge difference. (explain)

GeForce 8800 GTX		13800 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5830		12800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 1000 (8%)

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: Memory bandwidth is the maximum amount of information (measured in MB per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface within a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum 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 clock speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the graphics card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip can possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the card's clock speed. 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 quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.