GeForce GTX 580 3GB vs Radeon HD 5830

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 5830, which features a clock frequency of 800 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1000 MHz. It also uses a 256-bit bus, and makes use of a 40 nm design. It is made up of 1120(224x5) SPUs, 56 Texture Address Units, and 16 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 5830		175 Watts
GeForce GTX 580 3GB		244 Watts
	Difference: 69 Watts (39%)

Memory Bandwidth

The GeForce GTX 580 3GB should in theory be a lot faster than the Radeon HD 5830 overall. (explain)

GeForce GTX 580 3GB		192384 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5830		128000 MB/sec
	Difference: 64384 (50%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 580 3GB is just a bit (approximately 10%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 5830. (explain)

GeForce GTX 580 3GB		49408 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5830		44800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 4608 (10%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 580 3GB should be a lot (about 190%) more effective at FSAA than the Radeon HD 5830, and should be able to handle higher screen resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

GeForce GTX 580 3GB		37056 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5830		12800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 24256 (190%)

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 moved past the external memory interface in a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory speed. If it uses 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, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the graphics card can possibly record to its 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 clock 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 output rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.