GeForce 8400 GS 512MB vs Radeon HD 5830

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 5830, which comes with a clock frequency of 800 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1000 MHz. It also makes use of a 256-bit memory bus, and makes use of a 40 nm design. It features 1120(224x5) SPUs, 56 Texture Address Units, and 16 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 8400 GS 512MB		40 Watts
Radeon HD 5830		175 Watts
	Difference: 135 Watts (338%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 5830 should perform much faster than the GeForce 8400 GS 512MB overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 5830		128000 MB/sec
GeForce 8400 GS 512MB		6400 MB/sec
	Difference: 121600 (1900%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5830 will be quite a bit (approximately 762%) better at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce 8400 GS 512MB. (explain)

Radeon HD 5830		44800 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 8400 GS 512MB		5200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 39600 (762%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 5830 should be much (approximately 392%) more effective at AA than the GeForce 8400 GS 512MB, and also able to handle higher resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

Radeon HD 5830		12800 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 8400 GS 512MB		2600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 10200 (392%)

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 data (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in one second. It is calculated by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the memory bandwidth, the better 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 number is worked out by multiplying the total 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 per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the graphics card can possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure 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 outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on quite a few 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.