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GeForce 9400 GT 256MB vs Radeon HD 5830

Intro

The GeForce 9400 GT 256MB makes use of a 65 nm design. nVidia has clocked the core speed at 550 MHz. The GDDR2 RAM works at a frequency of 400 MHz on this card. It features 16 SPUs as well as 8 Texture Address Units and 4 Rasterization Operator Units.

Compare that to the Radeon HD 5830, which has GPU clock speed of 800 MHz, and 1024 MB of GDDR5 RAM set to run at 1000 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is comprised of 1120(224x5) SPUs, 56 Texture Address Units, and 16 Raster Operation Units.

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 9400 GT 256MB 50 Watts
Radeon HD 5830 175 Watts
Difference: 125 Watts (250%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 5830 should in theory be much faster than the GeForce 9400 GT 256MB overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 5830 128000 MB/sec
GeForce 9400 GT 256MB 12800 MB/sec
Difference: 115200 (900%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5830 will be a lot (about 918%) more effective at texture filtering than the GeForce 9400 GT 256MB. (explain)

Radeon HD 5830 44800 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 9400 GT 256MB 4400 Mtexels/sec
Difference: 40400 (918%)

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 5830 is superior to the GeForce 9400 GT 256MB, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 5830 12800 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 9400 GT 256MB 2200 Mpixels/sec
Difference: 10600 (482%)

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

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GeForce 9400 GT 256MB

Amazon.com

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Radeon HD 5830

Amazon.com

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Please note that the price comparisons are based on search keywords - sometimes it might show cards with very similar names that are not exactly the same as the one chosen in the comparison. We do try to filter out the wrong results as best we can, though.

Specifications

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Model GeForce 9400 GT 256MB Radeon HD 5830
Manufacturer nVidia AMD
Year August 2008 February 25, 2010
Code Name G96a Cypress LE
Memory 256 MB 1024 MB
Core Speed 550 MHz 800 MHz
Memory Speed 800 MHz 4000 MHz
Power (Max TDP) 50 watts 175 watts
Bandwidth 12800 MB/sec 128000 MB/sec
Texel Rate 4400 Mtexels/sec 44800 Mtexels/sec
Pixel Rate 2200 Mpixels/sec 12800 Mpixels/sec
Unified Shaders 16 1120(224x5)
Texture Mapping Units 8 56
Render Output Units 4 16
Bus Type GDDR2 GDDR5
Bus Width 128-bit 256-bit
Fab Process 65 nm 40 nm
Transistors 314 million 2154 million
Bus PCIe x16 2.0, PCI PCIe 2.1 x16
DirectX Version DirectX 10 DirectX 11
OpenGL Version OpenGL 3.0 OpenGL 3.2

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the largest amount of information (counted in MB per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in one second. It is worked out by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the faster 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 is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the graphics 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 card can possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the number of ROPs 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 bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.

Display Prices

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GeForce 9400 GT 256MB

Amazon.com

Check prices at:

Radeon HD 5830

Amazon.com

Check prices at:

Please note that the price comparisons are based on search keywords - sometimes it might show cards with very similar names that are not exactly the same as the one chosen in the comparison. We do try to filter out the wrong results as best we can, though.

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