GeForce GTS 450 vs Radeon HD 5870

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 5870, which comes with a clock speed of 850 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1200 MHz. It also features a 256-bit memory bus, and uses a 40 nm design. It is made up of 1600(320x5) SPUs, 80 Texture Address Units, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTS 450		106 Watts
Radeon HD 5870		188 Watts
	Difference: 82 Watts (77%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 5870 should be 166% faster than the GeForce GTS 450 in general, due to its higher data rate. (explain)

Radeon HD 5870		153600 MB/sec
GeForce GTS 450		57728 MB/sec
	Difference: 95872 (166%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5870 should be quite a bit (more or less 171%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTS 450. (explain)

Radeon HD 5870		68000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTS 450		25056 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 42944 (171%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 5870 is superior to the GeForce GTS 450, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon HD 5870		27200 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTS 450		12528 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 14672 (117%)

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 largest amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface in one second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on lots of 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.