GeForce 8600 GS (OEM) vs Radeon HD 5830

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 5830, which has a GPU core clock speed of 800 MHz, and 1024 MB of GDDR5 RAM running at 1000 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is made up of 1120(224x5) Stream Processors, 56 TAUs, and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 8600 GS (OEM)		47 Watts
Radeon HD 5830		175 Watts
	Difference: 128 Watts (272%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 5830, in theory, should be much faster than the GeForce 8600 GS (OEM) overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 5830		128000 MB/sec
GeForce 8600 GS (OEM)		12800 MB/sec
	Difference: 115200 (900%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5830 will be much (more or less 419%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce 8600 GS (OEM). (explain)

Radeon HD 5830		44800 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 8600 GS (OEM)		8640 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 36160 (419%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 5830 will be much (about 196%) more effective at FSAA than the GeForce 8600 GS (OEM), and will be able to handle higher resolutions better. (explain)

Radeon HD 5830		12800 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 8600 GS (OEM)		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 largest amount of data (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface within a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core 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 processed in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip could possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the core 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 fill rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.