GeForce GTX 590 vs Radeon HD 5850

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 5850, which makes use of a 40 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 725 MHz. The GDDR5 memory runs at a speed of 1000 MHz on this specific model. It features 1440(288x5) SPUs along with 72 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 5850		151 Watts
GeForce GTX 590		365 Watts
	Difference: 214 Watts (142%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the GeForce GTX 590 is 157% quicker than the Radeon HD 5850 overall, because of its greater data rate. (explain)

GeForce GTX 590		328320 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5850		128000 MB/sec
	Difference: 200320 (157%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 590 should be much (approximately 49%) faster with regards to AF than the Radeon HD 5850. (explain)

GeForce GTX 590		77696 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5850		52200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 25496 (49%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 590 is quite a bit (about 151%) better at FSAA than the Radeon HD 5850, and also should be capable of handling higher resolutions more effectively. (explain)

GeForce GTX 590		58272 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5850		23200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 35072 (151%)

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.

One or more cards in this comparison are multi-core. This means that their bandwidth, texel and pixel rates are theoretically doubled - this does not mean the card will actually perform twice as fast, but only that it should in theory be able to. Actual game benchmarks will give a more accurate idea of what it's capable of.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the max amount of information (in units of MB per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface within a second. It is calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the bandwidth is, 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 processed in one second. This is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core 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 maximum amount of pixels the graphics card could possibly record 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 fill rate is also dependant on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.