GeForce 8800 Ultra vs Radeon HD 5830

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 5830, which comes with GPU core speed of 800 MHz, and 1024 MB of GDDR5 RAM running at 1000 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is comprised of 1120(224x5) Stream Processors, 56 TAUs, and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 8800 Ultra		171 Watts
Radeon HD 5830		175 Watts
	Difference: 4 Watts (2%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 5830 should theoretically be a lot faster than the GeForce 8800 Ultra overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 5830		128000 MB/sec
GeForce 8800 Ultra		103680 MB/sec
	Difference: 24320 (23%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5830 will be a little bit (about 14%) more effective at texture filtering than the GeForce 8800 Ultra. (explain)

Radeon HD 5830		44800 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 8800 Ultra		39168 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 5632 (14%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce 8800 Ultra should be a bit (about 15%) more effective at full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 5830, and also capable of handling higher resolutions better. (explain)

GeForce 8800 Ultra		14688 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5830		12800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 1888 (15%)

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 largest amount of information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied in one second. This is worked out by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core 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 per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip can possibly record to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant 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.