GeForce 8500 GT vs Radeon HD 5830

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 5830, which features clock speeds of 800 MHz on the GPU, and 1000 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 1120(224x5) SPUs along with 56 Texture Address Units and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 8500 GT		45 Watts
Radeon HD 5830		175 Watts
	Difference: 130 Watts (289%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon HD 5830 should theoretically be much better than the GeForce 8500 GT overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 5830		128000 MB/sec
GeForce 8500 GT		12800 MB/sec
	Difference: 115200 (900%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5830 will be quite a bit (about 1144%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce 8500 GT. (explain)

Radeon HD 5830		44800 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 8500 GT		3600 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 41200 (1144%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 5830 should be much (approximately 611%) better at anti-aliasing than the GeForce 8500 GT, and also will be able to handle higher screen resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

Radeon HD 5830		12800 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 8500 GT		1800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 11000 (611%)

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 max amount of data (in units of MB per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface within a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the bandwidth is, 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 are applied in one second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total texture units by the core speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the graphics 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 number of pixels the graphics card could possibly write to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.