GeForce 8800 Ultra vs Radeon HD 5850

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 5850, which comes with a clock frequency of 725 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1000 MHz. It also uses a 256-bit bus, and uses a 40 nm design. It is made up of 1440(288x5) SPUs, 72 TAUs, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 5850		151 Watts
GeForce 8800 Ultra		171 Watts
	Difference: 20 Watts (13%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the Radeon HD 5850 should be a lot faster than the GeForce 8800 Ultra overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 5850		128000 MB/sec
GeForce 8800 Ultra		103680 MB/sec
	Difference: 24320 (23%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5850 is quite a bit (approximately 33%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the GeForce 8800 Ultra. (explain)

Radeon HD 5850		52200 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 8800 Ultra		39168 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 13032 (33%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 5850 will be a lot (about 58%) more effective at full screen anti-aliasing than the GeForce 8800 Ultra, and also should be capable of handling higher screen resolutions more effectively. (explain)

Radeon HD 5850		23200 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 8800 Ultra		14688 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 8512 (58%)

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 largest amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface within a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the 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 processed in one second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the graphics card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the graphics card could possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the core speed of the card. 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 get to the maximum fill rate.