GeForce 8600 GT 256MB DDR2 vs Radeon HD 5830

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 5830, which uses a 40 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 800 MHz. The GDDR5 memory runs at a frequency of 1000 MHz on this specific card. It features 1120(224x5) SPUs as well as 56 Texture Address Units and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 8600 GT 256MB DDR2		47 Watts
Radeon HD 5830		175 Watts
	Difference: 128 Watts (272%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 5830 should be 900% faster than the GeForce 8600 GT 256MB DDR2 overall, because of its higher bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon HD 5830		128000 MB/sec
GeForce 8600 GT 256MB DDR2		12800 MB/sec
	Difference: 115200 (900%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5830 will be quite a bit (approximately 419%) more effective at texture filtering than the GeForce 8600 GT 256MB DDR2. (explain)

Radeon HD 5830		44800 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 8600 GT 256MB DDR2		8640 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 36160 (419%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 5830 is superior to the GeForce 8600 GT 256MB DDR2, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon HD 5830		12800 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 8600 GT 256MB DDR2		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: Memory bandwidth is the max amount of data (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses 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 is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the video card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card could possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.