GeForce GTX 570 vs Radeon HD 5850

Intro

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

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 5850		151 Watts
GeForce GTX 570		219 Watts
	Difference: 68 Watts (45%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the GeForce GTX 570 should perform a little bit faster than the Radeon HD 5850 overall. (explain)

GeForce GTX 570		152000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5850		128000 MB/sec
	Difference: 24000 (19%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5850 is a little bit (approximately 19%) faster with regards to AF than the GeForce GTX 570. (explain)

Radeon HD 5850		52200 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 570		43920 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 8280 (19%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 570 should be a lot (more or less 26%) more effective at full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 5850, and will be capable of handling higher resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

GeForce GTX 570		29280 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5850		23200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 6080 (26%)

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 maximum amount of data (measured in megabytes per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface within a second. It's calculated by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR 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 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 processed in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the video card can possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.