GeForce GTX 465 vs Radeon HD 5850

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 5850, which comes with a clock speed of 725 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1000 MHz. It also features a 256-bit memory bus, and uses a 40 nm design. It is made up of 1440(288x5) SPUs, 72 TAUs, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 5850		151 Watts
GeForce GTX 465		200 Watts
	Difference: 49 Watts (32%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 5850 is 25% quicker than the GeForce GTX 465 overall, because of its higher data rate. (explain)

Radeon HD 5850		128000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 465		102592 MB/sec
	Difference: 25408 (25%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5850 is much (about 95%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTX 465. (explain)

Radeon HD 5850		52200 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 465		26708 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 25492 (95%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 5850 is the winner, but it probably won't make a huge difference. (explain)

Radeon HD 5850		23200 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 465		19424 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 3776 (19%)

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 maximum amount of data (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface in a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the better 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 applied in one second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the video card will be at 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 that the graphics chip can possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.