GeForce GTS 450 vs Radeon HD 5830

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 5830, which has clock speeds of 800 MHz on the GPU, and 1000 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 1120(224x5) SPUs along with 56 Texture Address Units and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTS 450		106 Watts
Radeon HD 5830		175 Watts
	Difference: 69 Watts (65%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 5830 should theoretically perform much faster than the GeForce GTS 450 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 5830		128000 MB/sec
GeForce GTS 450		57728 MB/sec
	Difference: 70272 (122%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5830 should be much (about 79%) more effective at texture filtering than the GeForce GTS 450. (explain)

Radeon HD 5830		44800 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTS 450		25056 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 19744 (79%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 5830 is a little bit (about 2%) faster with regards to anti-aliasing than the GeForce GTS 450, and will be able to handle higher resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

Radeon HD 5830		12800 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTS 450		12528 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 272 (2%)

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 MB per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the 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 maximum number of pixels that the graphics card could possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.