GeForce GTX 460 (OEM) vs Radeon HD 5870

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 5870, which features a clock speed of 850 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1200 MHz. It also uses a 256-bit memory bus, and makes use of a 40 nm design. It features 1600(320x5) SPUs, 80 Texture Address Units, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 460 (OEM)		150 Watts
Radeon HD 5870		188 Watts
	Difference: 38 Watts (25%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon HD 5870 should theoretically be much better than the GeForce GTX 460 (OEM) in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 5870		153600 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 460 (OEM)		108800 MB/sec
	Difference: 44800 (41%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5870 will be a lot (more or less 87%) more effective at AF than the GeForce GTX 460 (OEM). (explain)

Radeon HD 5870		68000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 460 (OEM)		36400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 31600 (87%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 5870 will be quite a bit (approximately 31%) faster with regards to anti-aliasing than the GeForce GTX 460 (OEM), and will be able to handle higher resolutions better. (explain)

Radeon HD 5870		27200 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 460 (OEM)		20800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 6400 (31%)

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 information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in one second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the better 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 processed in one second. This is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the graphics card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics card can possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). 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 ability to get to the max fill rate.