GeForce GTX 275 vs Radeon HD 5850

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 5850, which uses a 40 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 725 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM runs at a speed of 1000 MHz on this particular card. It features 1440(288x5) SPUs along with 72 TAUs and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 5850		151 Watts
GeForce GTX 275		219 Watts
	Difference: 68 Watts (45%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 5850 should be 1% faster than the GeForce GTX 275 in general, because of its greater data rate. (explain)

Radeon HD 5850		128000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 275		127008 MB/sec
	Difference: 992 (1%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5850 will be a small bit (more or less 3%) more effective at texture filtering than the GeForce GTX 275. (explain)

Radeon HD 5850		52200 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 275		50640 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 1560 (3%)

Pixel Rate

If running with lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon HD 5850 is superior to the GeForce GTX 275, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 5850		23200 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 275		17724 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 5476 (31%)

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 largest amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed in one second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card 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 in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip can possibly write to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes 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, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.