GeForce GTX 570 vs Radeon HD 5850

Intro

Compare those specifications 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 memory. It features 1440(288x5) SPUs along with 72 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

(No game benchmarks for this combination yet.)

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

Theoretically speaking, the GeForce GTX 570 is 19% quicker than the Radeon HD 5850 in general, because of its higher bandwidth. (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 small 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

The GeForce GTX 570 should be quite a bit (approximately 26%) more effective at anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 5850, and able to handle higher screen resolutions more effectively. (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: Bandwidth is the largest amount of information (in units of MB per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in one second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the memory bandwidth, 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 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 per second.

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