GeForce GTX 460 1GB vs Radeon HD 5850

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 5850, which features a clock speed of 725 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1000 MHz. It also uses a 256-bit memory bus, and makes use of a 40 nm design. It is comprised of 1440(288x5) SPUs, 72 TAUs, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 5850		151 Watts
GeForce GTX 460 1GB		160 Watts
	Difference: 9 Watts (6%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 5850 should theoretically be a little bit faster than the GeForce GTX 460 1GB overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 5850		128000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 460 1GB		115200 MB/sec
	Difference: 12800 (11%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5850 will be quite a bit (more or less 38%) faster with regards to AF than the GeForce GTX 460 1GB. (explain)

Radeon HD 5850		52200 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 460 1GB		37800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 14400 (38%)

Pixel Rate

If using lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon HD 5850 is the winner, though only just barely. (explain)

Radeon HD 5850		23200 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 460 1GB		21600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 1600 (7%)

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 information (measured in MB per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in one second. It's calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the video card could possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the core 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 is also dependant on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.