GeForce GTX 960 vs Radeon HD 5830

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 5830, which uses a 40 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 800 MHz. The GDDR5 memory runs at a frequency of 1000 MHz on this card. It features 1120(224x5) SPUs along with 56 Texture Address Units and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 960		120 Watts
Radeon HD 5830		175 Watts
	Difference: 55 Watts (46%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon HD 5830 should in theory be just a bit superior to the GeForce GTX 960 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 5830		128000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 960		112000 MB/sec
	Difference: 16000 (14%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 960 should be quite a bit (more or less 61%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 5830. (explain)

GeForce GTX 960		72128 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5830		44800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 27328 (61%)

Pixel Rate

If using lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 960 is a better choice, and very much so. (explain)

GeForce GTX 960		36064 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5830		12800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 23264 (182%)

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 maximum amount of information (in units of MB per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in one second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the video card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the graphics card can possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of ROPs 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 output rate is also dependant on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.