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GeForce GTX 470 vs Radeon HD 5850

Intro

The GeForce GTX 470 makes use of a 40 nm design. nVidia has set the core speed at 607 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM works at a frequency of 837 MHz on this specific card. It features 448 SPUs as well as 56 Texture Address Units and 40 ROPs.

Compare that to the Radeon HD 5850, which features core clock speeds of 725 MHz on the GPU, and 1000 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 1440(288x5) SPUs along with 72 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 5850 151 Watts
GeForce GTX 470 215 Watts
Difference: 64 Watts (42%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the GeForce GTX 470 is 5% faster than the Radeon HD 5850 in general, because of its greater bandwidth. (explain)

GeForce GTX 470 133920 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5850 128000 MB/sec
Difference: 5920 (5%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5850 is much (about 54%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the GeForce GTX 470. (explain)

Radeon HD 5850 52200 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 470 33992 Mtexels/sec
Difference: 18208 (54%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 470 will be a bit (approximately 5%) faster with regards to anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 5850, and should be able to handle higher resolutions more effectively. (explain)

GeForce GTX 470 24280 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5850 23200 Mpixels/sec
Difference: 1080 (5%)

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

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GeForce GTX 470

Amazon.com

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Radeon HD 5850

Amazon.com

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Please note that the price comparisons are based on search keywords - sometimes it might show cards with very similar names that are not exactly the same as the one chosen in the comparison. We do try to filter out the wrong results as best we can, though.

Specifications

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Model GeForce GTX 470 Radeon HD 5850
Manufacturer nVidia AMD
Year March 2010 September 30, 2009
Code Name GF100 Cypress PRO
Memory 1280 MB 1024 MB
Core Speed 607 MHz 725 MHz
Memory Speed 3348 MHz 4000 MHz
Power (Max TDP) 215 watts 151 watts
Bandwidth 133920 MB/sec 128000 MB/sec
Texel Rate 33992 Mtexels/sec 52200 Mtexels/sec
Pixel Rate 24280 Mpixels/sec 23200 Mpixels/sec
Unified Shaders 448 1440(288x5)
Texture Mapping Units 56 72
Render Output Units 40 32
Bus Type GDDR5 GDDR5
Bus Width 320-bit 256-bit
Fab Process 40 nm 40 nm
Transistors 3000 million 2154 million
Bus PCIe x16 PCIe 2.1 x16
DirectX Version DirectX 11 DirectX 11
OpenGL Version OpenGL 4.1 OpenGL 3.2

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the maximum amount of information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface within a second. It is worked out by multiplying the interface width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be applied in one second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core clock 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 applied in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the graphics card could possibly write to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.

Display Prices

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GeForce GTX 470

Amazon.com

Check prices at:

Radeon HD 5850

Amazon.com

Check prices at:

Please note that the price comparisons are based on search keywords - sometimes it might show cards with very similar names that are not exactly the same as the one chosen in the comparison. We do try to filter out the wrong results as best we can, though.

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