GeForce GTX 260 vs Radeon HD 5830

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 5830, which features core speeds of 800 MHz on the GPU, and 1000 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR5 RAM. 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)

Radeon HD 5830		175 Watts
GeForce GTX 260		182 Watts
	Difference: 7 Watts (4%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon HD 5830 should in theory be a small bit better than the GeForce GTX 260 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 5830		128000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 260		111888 MB/sec
	Difference: 16112 (14%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5830 should be quite a bit (more or less 22%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTX 260. (explain)

Radeon HD 5830		44800 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 260		36864 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 7936 (22%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 260 will be much (approximately 26%) faster with regards to AA than the Radeon HD 5830, and able to handle higher resolutions more effectively. (explain)

GeForce GTX 260		16128 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5830		12800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 3328 (26%)

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 (measured in MB per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If 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 number of texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This figure 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 graphics card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip can possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel fill rate also depends on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.