GeForce 9600 GT 512MB vs Radeon HD 5830

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 5830, which makes use of a 40 nm design. AMD has set the core frequency at 800 MHz. The GDDR5 memory is set to run at a speed of 1000 MHz on this card. It features 1120(224x5) SPUs along with 56 TAUs and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 9600 GT 512MB		95 Watts
Radeon HD 5830		175 Watts
	Difference: 80 Watts (84%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 5830, in theory, should be a lot faster than the GeForce 9600 GT 512MB overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 5830		128000 MB/sec
GeForce 9600 GT 512MB		57600 MB/sec
	Difference: 70400 (122%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5830 should be much (more or less 115%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce 9600 GT 512MB. (explain)

Radeon HD 5830		44800 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 9600 GT 512MB		20800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 24000 (115%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 5830 is quite a bit (approximately 23%) more effective at anti-aliasing than the GeForce 9600 GT 512MB, and also should be able to handle higher resolutions more effectively. (explain)

Radeon HD 5830		12800 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 9600 GT 512MB		10400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 2400 (23%)

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 (measured in MB per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface in a second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.