GeForce GTX 470 vs Radeon HD 5850

Intro

The GeForce GTX 470 comes with a clock frequency of 607 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 837 MHz. It also features a 320-bit bus, and makes use of a 40 nm design. It is comprised of 448 SPUs, 56 TAUs, and 40 Raster Operation Units.

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

Price Comparison

Please note that the price comparisons are based on search keywords, and might not be the exact same card listed on this page. We have no control over the accuracy of their search results.

GeForce GTX 470 Amazon.com Other US-based stores Amazon.co.uk Amazon.de Amazon.fr

Radeon HD 5850 Amazon.com Other US-based stores Amazon.co.uk Amazon.de Amazon.fr

Specifications

Model	GeForce GTX 470	Radeon HD 5850
Manufacturer	nVidia	ATi
Year	March 2010	September 30, 2009
Code Name	GF100	Cypress PRO
Fab Process	40 nm	40 nm
Bus	PCIe x16	PCIe 2.1 x16
Memory	1280 MB	1024 MB
Core Speed	607 MHz	725 MHz
Shader Speed	1215 MHz	(N/A) MHz
Memory Speed	837 MHz	1000 MHz
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
DirectX Version	DirectX 11	DirectX 11
OpenGL Version	OpenGL 4.1	OpenGL 3.2
Power (Max TDP)	215 watts	151 watts
Shader Model	5.0	5.0
Bandwidth	133920 MB/sec	128000 MB/sec
Texel Rate	33992 Mtexels/sec	52200 Mtexels/sec
Pixel Rate	24280 Mpixels/sec	23200 Mpixels/sec

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the max amount of data (measured in MB per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR RAM, 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 AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This number is worked out 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 card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics card can possibly write to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.