GeForce 9600 GSO 384MB vs Radeon HD 5830

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 5830, which features a clock speed of 800 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1000 MHz. It also uses a 256-bit memory bus, and makes use of a 40 nm design. It features 1120(224x5) SPUs, 56 TAUs, and 16 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 9600 GSO 384MB		84 Watts
Radeon HD 5830		175 Watts
	Difference: 91 Watts (108%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 5830 should be a lot faster than the GeForce 9600 GSO 384MB overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 5830		128000 MB/sec
GeForce 9600 GSO 384MB		38400 MB/sec
	Difference: 89600 (233%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5830 is quite a bit (about 70%) more effective at AF than the GeForce 9600 GSO 384MB. (explain)

Radeon HD 5830		44800 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 9600 GSO 384MB		26400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 18400 (70%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 5830 is the winner, by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 5830		12800 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 9600 GSO 384MB		6600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 6200 (94%)

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 max amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface within a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. 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 are processed per second. This is calculated by multiplying the total texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the video card could possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.