GeForce GTX 285 1GB vs Radeon HD 5850

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 5850, which comes with clock speeds of 725 MHz on the GPU, and 1000 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 1440(288x5) SPUs along with 72 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 5850		151 Watts
GeForce GTX 285 1GB		204 Watts
	Difference: 53 Watts (35%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the GeForce GTX 285 1GB will be 24% faster than the Radeon HD 5850 overall, due to its higher data rate. (explain)

GeForce GTX 285 1GB		158976 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5850		128000 MB/sec
	Difference: 30976 (24%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5850 is a small bit (about 1%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTX 285 1GB. (explain)

Radeon HD 5850		52200 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 285 1GB		51840 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 360 (1%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 5850 is superior to the GeForce GTX 285 1GB, but not by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 5850		23200 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 285 1GB		20736 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 2464 (12%)

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: Memory bandwidth is the max amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved over 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 type RAM, the result should 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 applied per second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher this number, 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 most pixels that the graphics chip could possibly record to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.