GeForce 8800 GTS (G80) 320MB vs Radeon HD 5770

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 5770, which makes use of a 40 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 850 MHz. The GDDR5 memory is set to run at a frequency of 1200 MHz on this particular card. It features 800(160x5) SPUs along with 40 Texture Address Units and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 5770		108 Watts
GeForce 8800 GTS (G80) 320MB		143 Watts
	Difference: 35 Watts (32%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 5770 is 21% faster than the GeForce 8800 GTS (G80) 320MB in general, because of its higher bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon HD 5770		76800 MB/sec
GeForce 8800 GTS (G80) 320MB		63360 MB/sec
	Difference: 13440 (21%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5770 will be a lot (approximately 38%) more effective at AF than the GeForce 8800 GTS (G80) 320MB. (explain)

Radeon HD 5770		34000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 8800 GTS (G80) 320MB		24624 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 9376 (38%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 5770 is the winner, by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 5770		13600 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 8800 GTS (G80) 320MB		10260 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 3340 (33%)

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 transferred over the external memory interface in a second. It is calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the graphics card can possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on many 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.