GeForce GT 440 1.5GB vs Radeon HD 5870

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 5870, which comes with a clock speed of 850 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1200 MHz. It also makes use of a 256-bit memory bus, and uses a 40 nm design. It features 1600(320x5) SPUs, 80 TAUs, and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GT 440 1.5GB		56 Watts
Radeon HD 5870		188 Watts
	Difference: 132 Watts (236%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 5870 should theoretically perform much faster than the GeForce GT 440 1.5GB overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 5870		153600 MB/sec
GeForce GT 440 1.5GB		43200 MB/sec
	Difference: 110400 (256%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5870 is quite a bit (approximately 377%) better at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GT 440 1.5GB. (explain)

Radeon HD 5870		68000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GT 440 1.5GB		14256 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 53744 (377%)

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 5870 is the winner, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 5870		27200 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GT 440 1.5GB		14256 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 12944 (91%)

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 max amount of information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in a second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed in one second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the graphics card will be at 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 that the graphics chip could possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel fill rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.