GeForce GTX 950 vs Radeon HD 5850

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 5850, which comes with a core clock speed of 725 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1000 MHz. It also uses a 256-bit memory bus, and uses a 40 nm design. It is comprised of 1440(288x5) SPUs, 72 Texture Address Units, and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 950		90 Watts
Radeon HD 5850		151 Watts
	Difference: 61 Watts (68%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon HD 5850 should in theory be much better than the GeForce GTX 950 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 5850		128000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 950		105728 MB/sec
	Difference: 22272 (21%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5850 should be a bit (approximately 6%) more effective at texture filtering than the GeForce GTX 950. (explain)

Radeon HD 5850		52200 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 950		49152 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 3048 (6%)

Pixel Rate

If using lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 950 is superior to the Radeon HD 5850, by a large margin. (explain)

GeForce GTX 950		32768 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5850		23200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 9568 (41%)

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 maximum amount of information (counted in MB per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in one second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's bus 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 better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units 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 processed in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the graphics card could 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 the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.