GeForce 8800 Ultra vs Radeon HD 5850

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 5850, which has core speeds of 725 MHz on the GPU, and 1000 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 1440(288x5) SPUs as well as 72 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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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

The Radeon HD 5850 should theoretically be quite a bit faster than the GeForce 8800 Ultra overall. (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 (more or less 33%) better 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 should be much (about 58%) faster with regards to AA than the GeForce 8800 Ultra, and also should be able to handle higher resolutions more effectively. (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

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the max amount of information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in one second. It's worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher 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 number of texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the video card can possibly record to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.