GeForce 8800 GS 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 RAM running at 1000 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is comprised of 1120(224x5) SPUs, 56 TAUs, and 16 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 8800 GS		105 Watts
Radeon HD 5830		175 Watts
	Difference: 70 Watts (67%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 5830 should theoretically perform a lot faster than the GeForce 8800 GS in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 5830		128000 MB/sec
GeForce 8800 GS		38400 MB/sec
	Difference: 89600 (233%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5830 will be a lot (about 70%) better at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce 8800 GS. (explain)

Radeon HD 5830		44800 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 8800 GS		26400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 18400 (70%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 5830 will be a lot (about 94%) more effective at AA than the GeForce 8800 GS, and also should be capable of handling higher screen resolutions while still performing well. (explain)

Radeon HD 5830		12800 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 8800 GS		6600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 6200 (94%)

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 largest amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in one second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, 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 number of texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the graphics card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics card can possibly write to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.