GeForce GTX 460 SE vs Radeon HD 5830

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 5830, which comes with clock speeds of 800 MHz on the GPU, and 1000 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR5 memory. 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 GTX 460 SE		150 Watts
Radeon HD 5830		175 Watts
	Difference: 25 Watts (17%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the Radeon HD 5830 should perform a bit faster than the GeForce GTX 460 SE in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 5830		128000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 460 SE		108800 MB/sec
	Difference: 19200 (18%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5830 is quite a bit (about 44%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTX 460 SE. (explain)

Radeon HD 5830		44800 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 460 SE		31200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 13600 (44%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 460 SE is a lot (more or less 63%) faster with regards to full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 5830, and also able to handle higher resolutions more effectively. (explain)

GeForce GTX 460 SE		20800 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5830		12800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 8000 (63%)

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 max amount of data (counted in MB per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. 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 texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card can possibly record 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 - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.