GeForce GTX 460 2GB vs Radeon HD 5850

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 5850, which uses a 40 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 725 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM is set to run at a speed of 1000 MHz on this particular card. It features 1440(288x5) SPUs along with 72 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 5850		151 Watts
GeForce GTX 460 2GB		160 Watts
	Difference: 9 Watts (6%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the Radeon HD 5850 should perform just a bit faster than the GeForce GTX 460 2GB in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 5850		128000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 460 2GB		115200 MB/sec
	Difference: 12800 (11%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5850 is a lot (approximately 38%) more effective at texture filtering than the GeForce GTX 460 2GB. (explain)

Radeon HD 5850		52200 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 460 2GB		37800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 14400 (38%)

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 5850 is superior to the GeForce GTX 460 2GB, but it probably won't make a huge difference. (explain)

Radeon HD 5850		23200 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 460 2GB		21600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 1600 (7%)

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 information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface within a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once 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 higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the graphics card could possibly write to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called 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, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.