GeForce GTX 285 2GB vs Radeon HD 5870

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 5870, which uses a 40 nm design. AMD has set the core frequency at 850 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM runs at a speed of 1200 MHz on this particular model. It features 1600(320x5) SPUs as well as 80 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 5870		188 Watts
GeForce GTX 285 2GB		204 Watts
	Difference: 16 Watts (9%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the GeForce GTX 285 2GB should in theory be a small bit superior to the Radeon HD 5870 in general. (explain)

GeForce GTX 285 2GB		158976 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5870		153600 MB/sec
	Difference: 5376 (4%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5870 is a lot (approximately 31%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTX 285 2GB. (explain)

Radeon HD 5870		68000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 285 2GB		51840 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 16160 (31%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 5870 will be quite a bit (more or less 31%) more effective at FSAA than the GeForce GTX 285 2GB, and should be able to handle higher resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

Radeon HD 5870		27200 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 285 2GB		20736 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 6464 (31%)

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 data (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface within a second. It is calculated by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, the faster 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 number of texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the graphics card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics card could possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount 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 rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.