GeForce GTX 470 vs Radeon HD 5850

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 5850, which uses a 40 nm design. AMD has set the core speed at 725 MHz. The GDDR5 memory is set to run at a speed of 1000 MHz on this particular card. It features 1440(288x5) SPUs as well as 72 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 5850		151 Watts
GeForce GTX 470		215 Watts
	Difference: 64 Watts (42%)

Memory Bandwidth

The GeForce GTX 470 should in theory perform just a bit faster than the Radeon HD 5850 in general. (explain)

GeForce GTX 470		133920 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5850		128000 MB/sec
	Difference: 5920 (5%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5850 will be quite a bit (about 54%) faster with regards to AF than the GeForce GTX 470. (explain)

Radeon HD 5850		52200 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 470		33992 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 18208 (54%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 470 is superior to the Radeon HD 5850, but only just. (explain)

GeForce GTX 470		24280 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5850		23200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 1080 (5%)

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 maximum amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, 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 texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one second. This is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card could possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.