GeForce GTX 590 vs Radeon HD 5830

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 5830, which makes use of a 40 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 800 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM works at a speed of 1000 MHz on this particular model. It features 1120(224x5) SPUs along with 56 TAUs and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

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

The GeForce GTX 590 should in theory perform quite a bit faster than the Radeon HD 5830 in general. (explain)

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

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 590 is a lot (about 73%) better at texture 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 using lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 590 is a better choice, 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: Memory bandwidth is the largest amount of information (counted in MB per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in one second. The number is calculated 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 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one second. This figure is worked out 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 handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip can possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the core speed of the card. 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 output rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.