GeForce 8600 GT 256MB GDDR3 vs Radeon HD 5830

Intro

Compare 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 RAM. It features 1120(224x5) SPUs as well as 56 Texture Address Units and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 8600 GT 256MB GDDR3		47 Watts
Radeon HD 5830		175 Watts
	Difference: 128 Watts (272%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 5830, in theory, should be quite a bit faster than the GeForce 8600 GT 256MB GDDR3 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 5830		128000 MB/sec
GeForce 8600 GT 256MB GDDR3		22400 MB/sec
	Difference: 105600 (471%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5830 will be a lot (approximately 419%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the GeForce 8600 GT 256MB GDDR3. (explain)

Radeon HD 5830		44800 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 8600 GT 256MB GDDR3		8640 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 36160 (419%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 5830 will be a lot (about 196%) more effective at full screen anti-aliasing than the GeForce 8600 GT 256MB GDDR3, and also able to handle higher screen resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

Radeon HD 5830		12800 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 8600 GT 256MB GDDR3		4320 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 8480 (196%)

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 information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface within a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the video card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card could possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.