GeForce GT 1030 vs Radeon HD 5870

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 5870, which comes with core clock speeds of 850 MHz on the GPU, and 1200 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 1600(320x5) SPUs along with 80 TAUs and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GT 1030		30 Watts
Radeon HD 5870		188 Watts
	Difference: 158 Watts (527%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 5870 should theoretically be quite a bit faster than the GeForce GT 1030 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 5870		153600 MB/sec
GeForce GT 1030		49152 MB/sec
	Difference: 104448 (213%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5870 will be much (more or less 68%) better at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GT 1030. (explain)

Radeon HD 5870		68000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GT 1030		40480 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 27520 (68%)

Pixel Rate

If running with lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon HD 5870 is a better choice, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon HD 5870		27200 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GT 1030		20240 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 6960 (34%)

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 megabytes per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in one second. It is worked out by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the card's memory bandwidth, 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 texture map elements (texels) that can be processed in one second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip could possibly write to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel output 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 max fill rate.