GeForce 8800 Ultra vs Radeon HD 5830

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 5830, which has clock speeds of 800 MHz on the GPU, and 1000 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 1120(224x5) SPUs along with 56 Texture Address Units and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

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

Performance-wise, the Radeon HD 5830 should theoretically be much better 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 just a bit (approximately 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

If using lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the GeForce 8800 Ultra is superior to the Radeon HD 5830, not by a very large margin though. (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 maximum amount of data (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface within a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The higher 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 in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the graphics card can possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel fill rate also depends on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.