GeForce 8600 GT 1GB DDR2 vs Radeon HD 5830

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 5830, which makes use of a 40 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 800 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM is set to run at a speed of 1000 MHz on this specific model. It features 1120(224x5) SPUs as well as 56 Texture Address Units and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 8600 GT 1GB DDR2		47 Watts
Radeon HD 5830		175 Watts
	Difference: 128 Watts (272%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the Radeon HD 5830 should be much faster than the GeForce 8600 GT 1GB DDR2 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 5830		128000 MB/sec
GeForce 8600 GT 1GB DDR2		12800 MB/sec
	Difference: 115200 (900%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5830 should be a lot (approximately 419%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the GeForce 8600 GT 1GB DDR2. (explain)

Radeon HD 5830		44800 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 8600 GT 1GB DDR2		8640 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 36160 (419%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 5830 is a better choice, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 5830		12800 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 8600 GT 1GB DDR2		4320 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 8480 (196%)

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 data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in one second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card could possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units 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 output rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.