GeForce GTX 280 vs Radeon HD 5850

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 5850, which has a GPU core clock speed of 725 MHz, and 1024 MB of GDDR5 memory set to run at 1000 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also features 1440(288x5) Stream Processors, 72 TAUs, and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 5850		151 Watts
GeForce GTX 280		236 Watts
	Difference: 85 Watts (56%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the GeForce GTX 280 will be 11% faster than the Radeon HD 5850 overall, due to its higher data rate. (explain)

GeForce GTX 280		141696 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5850		128000 MB/sec
	Difference: 13696 (11%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5850 will be a little bit (approximately 8%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTX 280. (explain)

Radeon HD 5850		52200 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 280		48160 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 4040 (8%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 5850 is the winner, not by a very large margin though. (explain)

Radeon HD 5850		23200 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 280		19264 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 3936 (20%)

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 max amount of data (measured in MB per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface in one second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher 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 texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total number 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 in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the graphics card could possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the clock 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 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 ability to reach the maximum fill rate.