GeForce GTS 450 1GB vs Radeon HD 5770

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 5770, which makes use of a 40 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 850 MHz. The GDDR5 memory is set to run at a speed of 1200 MHz on this card. It features 800(160x5) SPUs as well as 40 TAUs and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTS 450 1GB		106 Watts
Radeon HD 5770		108 Watts
	Difference: 2 Watts (2%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 5770 should be much faster than the GeForce GTS 450 1GB in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 5770		76800 MB/sec
GeForce GTS 450 1GB		57728 MB/sec
	Difference: 19072 (33%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5770 should be quite a bit (more or less 36%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTS 450 1GB. (explain)

Radeon HD 5770		34000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTS 450 1GB		25056 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 8944 (36%)

Pixel Rate

If using lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon HD 5770 is the winner, but only just. (explain)

Radeon HD 5770		13600 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTS 450 1GB		12528 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 1072 (9%)

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 over 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 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 faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics card could possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the clock 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 rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.