GeForce GTX 580 3GB vs Radeon HD 5850

Intro

Compare all of that 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 RAM. It features 1440(288x5) SPUs as well as 72 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 5850		151 Watts
GeForce GTX 580 3GB		244 Watts
	Difference: 93 Watts (62%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the GeForce GTX 580 3GB should be 50% quicker than the Radeon HD 5850 in general, because of its greater data rate. (explain)

GeForce GTX 580 3GB		192384 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5850		128000 MB/sec
	Difference: 64384 (50%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5850 should be a little bit (about 6%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTX 580 3GB. (explain)

Radeon HD 5850		52200 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 580 3GB		49408 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 2792 (6%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 580 3GB should be quite a bit (more or less 60%) faster with regards to AA than the Radeon HD 5850, and also should be able to handle higher resolutions while still performing well. (explain)

GeForce GTX 580 3GB		37056 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5850		23200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 13856 (60%)

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 maximum amount of information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in a second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the video card could possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.