GeForce GTX 480 vs Radeon HD 5850

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 5850, which comes with 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 TAUs and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 5850		151 Watts
GeForce GTX 480		250 Watts
	Difference: 99 Watts (66%)

Memory Bandwidth

The GeForce GTX 480 should in theory perform quite a bit faster than the Radeon HD 5850 in general. (explain)

GeForce GTX 480		177408 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5850		128000 MB/sec
	Difference: 49408 (39%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5850 will be quite a bit (about 24%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTX 480. (explain)

Radeon HD 5850		52200 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 480		42000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 10200 (24%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 480 will be much (approximately 45%) faster with regards to AA than the Radeon HD 5850, and will be able to handle higher resolutions while still performing well. (explain)

GeForce GTX 480		33600 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5850		23200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 10400 (45%)

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 largest amount of information (measured in MB per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface within a second. It is calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the faster 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 are processed in one second. This is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels per second.

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