GeForce GTX 460 1GB vs Radeon HD 5870

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 5870, which uses a 40 nm design. AMD has set the core speed at 850 MHz. The GDDR5 memory works at a speed of 1200 MHz on this particular model. It features 1600(320x5) SPUs as well as 80 TAUs and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 460 1GB		160 Watts
Radeon HD 5870		188 Watts
	Difference: 28 Watts (18%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon HD 5870 should in theory be quite a bit better than the GeForce GTX 460 1GB in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 5870		153600 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 460 1GB		115200 MB/sec
	Difference: 38400 (33%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5870 will be much (approximately 80%) better at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTX 460 1GB. (explain)

Radeon HD 5870		68000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 460 1GB		37800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 30200 (80%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 5870 is superior to the GeForce GTX 460 1GB, by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 5870		27200 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 460 1GB		21600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 5600 (26%)

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 information (in units of MB per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in one second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR RAM, it must 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 AA, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This is worked out by multiplying the total 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 a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics card could possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes 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, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.