GeForce GTX 260 vs Radeon HD 5870

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 5870, which comes with clock speeds of 850 MHz on the GPU, and 1200 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 1600(320x5) SPUs along with 80 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 260		182 Watts
Radeon HD 5870		188 Watts
	Difference: 6 Watts (3%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the Radeon HD 5870 should perform a lot faster than the GeForce GTX 260 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 5870		153600 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 260		111888 MB/sec
	Difference: 41712 (37%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5870 is quite a bit (approximately 84%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTX 260. (explain)

Radeon HD 5870		68000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 260		36864 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 31136 (84%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 5870 should be quite a bit (approximately 69%) better at full screen anti-aliasing than the GeForce GTX 260, and also able to handle higher screen resolutions better. (explain)

Radeon HD 5870		27200 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 260		16128 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 11072 (69%)

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 maximum amount of data (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in one second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 once 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 AA, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the graphics card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics chip can possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel output rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.