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GeForce GTX 480 vs Radeon HD 5870

Intro

The GeForce GTX 480 uses a 40 nm design. nVidia has clocked the core speed at 700 MHz. The GDDR5 memory works at a frequency of 924 MHz on this model. It features 480 SPUs as well as 60 TAUs and 48 Rasterization Operator Units.

Compare that to the Radeon HD 5870, which comes with a clock speed of 850 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1200 MHz. It also makes use of a 256-bit bus, and uses a 40 nm design. It features 1600(320x5) SPUs, 80 Texture Address Units, and 32 ROPs.

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 5870 188 Watts
GeForce GTX 480 250 Watts
Difference: 62 Watts (33%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the GeForce GTX 480 should in theory be just a bit better than the Radeon HD 5870 overall. (explain)

GeForce GTX 480 177408 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5870 153600 MB/sec
Difference: 23808 (16%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5870 will be much (more or less 62%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTX 480. (explain)

Radeon HD 5870 68000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 480 42000 Mtexels/sec
Difference: 26000 (62%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 480 will be quite a bit (about 24%) faster with regards to anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 5870, and should be able to handle higher resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

GeForce GTX 480 33600 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5870 27200 Mpixels/sec
Difference: 6400 (24%)

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

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GeForce GTX 480

Amazon.com

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Radeon HD 5870

Amazon.com

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Please note that the price comparisons are based on search keywords - sometimes it might show cards with very similar names that are not exactly the same as the one chosen in the comparison. We do try to filter out the wrong results as best we can, though.

Specifications

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Model GeForce GTX 480 Radeon HD 5870
Manufacturer nVidia AMD
Year March 2010 September 23, 2009
Code Name GF100 Cypress XT
Memory 1536 MB 1024 MB
Core Speed 700 MHz 850 MHz
Memory Speed 3696 MHz 4800 MHz
Power (Max TDP) 250 watts 188 watts
Bandwidth 177408 MB/sec 153600 MB/sec
Texel Rate 42000 Mtexels/sec 68000 Mtexels/sec
Pixel Rate 33600 Mpixels/sec 27200 Mpixels/sec
Unified Shaders 480 1600(320x5)
Texture Mapping Units 60 80
Render Output Units 48 32
Bus Type GDDR5 GDDR5
Bus Width 384-bit 256-bit
Fab Process 40 nm 40 nm
Transistors 3000 million 2154 million
Bus PCIe x16 PCIe 2.1 x16
DirectX Version DirectX 11 DirectX 11
OpenGL Version OpenGL 4.1 OpenGL 3.2

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the max amount of information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface within a second. It is calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the faster 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 per second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the graphics card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card can possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of Render Output Units 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 fill rate is also dependant on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.

Display Prices

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GeForce GTX 480

Amazon.com

Check prices at:

Radeon HD 5870

Amazon.com

Check prices at:

Please note that the price comparisons are based on search keywords - sometimes it might show cards with very similar names that are not exactly the same as the one chosen in the comparison. We do try to filter out the wrong results as best we can, though.

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