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GeForce 8800 Ultra vs Radeon HD 5850

Intro

The GeForce 8800 Ultra has core clock speeds of 612 MHz on the GPU, and 1080 MHz on the 768 MB of GDDR3 memory. It features 128 SPUs as well as 64 Texture Address Units and 24 ROPs.

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 is set to run at a frequency of 1000 MHz on this card. It features 1440(288x5) SPUs as well as 72 TAUs and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 5850 151 Watts
GeForce 8800 Ultra 171 Watts
Difference: 20 Watts (13%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 5850 should be quite a bit faster than the GeForce 8800 Ultra in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 5850 128000 MB/sec
GeForce 8800 Ultra 103680 MB/sec
Difference: 24320 (23%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5850 will be much (about 33%) more effective at texture filtering than the GeForce 8800 Ultra. (explain)

Radeon HD 5850 52200 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 8800 Ultra 39168 Mtexels/sec
Difference: 13032 (33%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 5850 is a lot (more or less 58%) better at full screen anti-aliasing than the GeForce 8800 Ultra, and also will be capable of handling higher resolutions while still performing well. (explain)

Radeon HD 5850 23200 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 8800 Ultra 14688 Mpixels/sec
Difference: 8512 (58%)

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

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GeForce 8800 Ultra

Amazon.com

Check prices at:

Radeon HD 5850

Amazon.com

Check prices at:

Please note that the price comparisons are based on search keywords - sometimes it might show cards with very similar names that are not exactly the same as the one chosen in the comparison. We do try to filter out the wrong results as best we can, though.

Specifications

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Model GeForce 8800 Ultra Radeon HD 5850
Manufacturer nVidia AMD
Year May 2007 September 30, 2009
Code Name G80 Cypress PRO
Memory 768 MB 1024 MB
Core Speed 612 MHz 725 MHz
Memory Speed 2160 MHz 4000 MHz
Power (Max TDP) 171 watts 151 watts
Bandwidth 103680 MB/sec 128000 MB/sec
Texel Rate 39168 Mtexels/sec 52200 Mtexels/sec
Pixel Rate 14688 Mpixels/sec 23200 Mpixels/sec
Unified Shaders 128 1440(288x5)
Texture Mapping Units 64 72
Render Output Units 24 32
Bus Type GDDR3 GDDR5
Bus Width 384-bit 256-bit
Fab Process 90 nm 40 nm
Transistors 681 million 2154 million
Bus PCIe x16 PCIe 2.1 x16
DirectX Version DirectX 10 DirectX 11
OpenGL Version OpenGL 3.0 OpenGL 3.2

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the largest amount of information (in units of MB per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the graphics 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 most pixels the graphics card could possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.

Display Prices

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GeForce 8800 Ultra

Amazon.com

Check prices at:

Radeon HD 5850

Amazon.com

Check prices at:

Please note that the price comparisons are based on search keywords - sometimes it might show cards with very similar names that are not exactly the same as the one chosen in the comparison. We do try to filter out the wrong results as best we can, though.

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