GeForce GTX 470 vs Radeon HD 5850

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 5850, which features a clock frequency 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 features 1440(288x5) SPUs, 72 Texture Address Units, and 32 ROPs.

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

Theoretically speaking, the GeForce GTX 470 should perform a little bit faster than the Radeon HD 5850 overall. (explain)

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

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5850 is much (more or less 54%) more effective at 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 running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 470 is superior to the Radeon HD 5850, though not by far. (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: Bandwidth is the largest amount of information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface in one second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one second. This is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the video 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 number of pixels the graphics card can possibly write to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel 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 reach the maximum fill rate.