GeForce GTX 590 vs Radeon HD 5830

Intro

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

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 5830		175 Watts
GeForce GTX 590		365 Watts
	Difference: 190 Watts (109%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the GeForce GTX 590 is 157% quicker than the Radeon HD 5830 overall, because of its greater data rate. (explain)

GeForce GTX 590		328320 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5830		128000 MB/sec
	Difference: 200320 (157%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 590 will be a lot (more or less 73%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 5830. (explain)

GeForce GTX 590		77696 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5830		44800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 32896 (73%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high screen resolution is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 590 is superior to the Radeon HD 5830, by a large margin. (explain)

GeForce GTX 590		58272 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5830		12800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 45472 (355%)

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.

One or more cards in this comparison are multi-core. This means that their bandwidth, texel and pixel rates are theoretically doubled - this does not mean the card will actually perform twice as fast, but only that it should in theory be able to. Actual game benchmarks will give a more accurate idea of what it's capable of.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the max amount of information (counted in MB per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface within a second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR RAM, it must 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 anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the graphics card can possibly record to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant 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.