GeForce GTX 960 vs Radeon HD 5850

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 5850, which makes use of a 40 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 725 MHz. The GDDR5 memory works at a frequency of 1000 MHz on this card. It features 1440(288x5) SPUs as well as 72 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 960		120 Watts
Radeon HD 5850		151 Watts
	Difference: 31 Watts (26%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 5850 should perform a bit faster than the GeForce GTX 960 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 5850		128000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 960		112000 MB/sec
	Difference: 16000 (14%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 960 is quite a bit (about 38%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 5850. (explain)

GeForce GTX 960		72128 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5850		52200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 19928 (38%)

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 960 is superior to the Radeon HD 5850, by a large margin. (explain)

GeForce GTX 960		36064 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5850		23200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 12864 (55%)

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 max amount of information (counted in MB per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface within a second. It's worked out by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the bandwidth is, 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 texture map elements (texels) that can be processed in one second. This figure is worked out 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 per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the video card could possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.