GeForce 8600 GT 1GB DDR2 vs Radeon HD 5830

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 5830, which uses a 40 nm design. AMD has set the core frequency at 800 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM runs at a speed of 1000 MHz on this card. It features 1120(224x5) SPUs as well as 56 Texture Address Units and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 8600 GT 1GB DDR2		47 Watts
Radeon HD 5830		175 Watts
	Difference: 128 Watts (272%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 5830 should perform much faster than the GeForce 8600 GT 1GB DDR2 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 5830		128000 MB/sec
GeForce 8600 GT 1GB DDR2		12800 MB/sec
	Difference: 115200 (900%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5830 will be quite a bit (more or less 419%) faster with regards to AF than the GeForce 8600 GT 1GB DDR2. (explain)

Radeon HD 5830		44800 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 8600 GT 1GB DDR2		8640 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 36160 (419%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 5830 should be quite a bit (more or less 196%) more effective at anti-aliasing than the GeForce 8600 GT 1GB DDR2, and should be able to handle higher resolutions better. (explain)

Radeon HD 5830		12800 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 8600 GT 1GB DDR2		4320 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 8480 (196%)

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 maximum amount of information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one second. This is worked out by multiplying the total texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the graphics card will be at handling 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 that the graphics 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 colour ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.