GeForce 9600 GT 1GB vs Radeon HD 5830

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 5830, which makes use of a 40 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 800 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM runs at a speed of 1000 MHz on this model. It features 1120(224x5) SPUs as well as 56 TAUs and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 9600 GT 1GB		95 Watts
Radeon HD 5830		175 Watts
	Difference: 80 Watts (84%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the Radeon HD 5830 should be much faster than the GeForce 9600 GT 1GB in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 5830		128000 MB/sec
GeForce 9600 GT 1GB		57600 MB/sec
	Difference: 70400 (122%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5830 is quite a bit (approximately 115%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce 9600 GT 1GB. (explain)

Radeon HD 5830		44800 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 9600 GT 1GB		20800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 24000 (115%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 5830 is a lot (about 23%) better at full screen anti-aliasing than the GeForce 9600 GT 1GB, and will be able to handle higher resolutions better. (explain)

Radeon HD 5830		12800 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 9600 GT 1GB		10400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 2400 (23%)

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 (counted in MB per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in a second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the graphics card will be at handling 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 chip can possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.