GeForce GTX 570 vs Radeon HD 5850

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 5850, which has GPU core speed of 725 MHz, and 1024 MB of GDDR5 memory set to run at 1000 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also features 1440(288x5) Stream Processors, 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 570		219 Watts
	Difference: 68 Watts (45%)

Memory Bandwidth

The GeForce GTX 570 should theoretically perform a bit faster than the Radeon HD 5850 overall. (explain)

GeForce GTX 570		152000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5850		128000 MB/sec
	Difference: 24000 (19%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5850 will be a bit (more or less 19%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTX 570. (explain)

Radeon HD 5850		52200 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 570		43920 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 8280 (19%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high resolution is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 570 is a better choice, and very much so. (explain)

GeForce GTX 570		29280 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5850		23200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 6080 (26%)

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 largest amount of information (in units of MB per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in one second. The number is calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip could possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.