GeForce GTX 460 vs Radeon HD 5870

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 5870, which has core clock speeds of 850 MHz on the GPU, and 1200 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 1600(320x5) SPUs along with 80 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

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

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 5870 should in theory be a lot faster than the GeForce GTX 460 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 5870		153600 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 460		86400 MB/sec
	Difference: 67200 (78%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5870 will be much (more or less 80%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the GeForce GTX 460. (explain)

Radeon HD 5870		68000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 460		37800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 30200 (80%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 5870 should be quite a bit (more or less 68%) faster with regards to full screen anti-aliasing than the GeForce GTX 460, and should be capable of handling higher resolutions better. (explain)

Radeon HD 5870		27200 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 460		16200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 11000 (68%)

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 (measured in megabytes per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the interface width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied in one second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics card could possibly record to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.