GeForce GTX 295 vs Radeon HD 5830

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 5830, which has clock speeds of 800 MHz on the GPU, and 1000 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 1120(224x5) SPUs along with 56 Texture Address Units and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 5830		175 Watts
GeForce GTX 295		289 Watts
	Difference: 114 Watts (65%)

Memory Bandwidth

The GeForce GTX 295 should in theory be quite a bit faster than the Radeon HD 5830 in general. (explain)

GeForce GTX 295		223776 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5830		128000 MB/sec
	Difference: 95776 (75%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 295 is quite a bit (about 106%) better at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 5830. (explain)

GeForce GTX 295		92160 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5830		44800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 47360 (106%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high resolution is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 295 is the winner, and very much so. (explain)

GeForce GTX 295		32256 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5830		12800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 19456 (152%)

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: Bandwidth is the maximum amount of information (measured in MB per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in one second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and higher screen 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 number of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the graphics card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the graphics card could possibly write to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.