GeForce GTX 950 vs Radeon HD 5850

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 5850, which comes with GPU core speed of 725 MHz, and 1024 MB of GDDR5 memory set to run at 1000 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is made up of 1440(288x5) Stream Processors, 72 TAUs, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 950		90 Watts
Radeon HD 5850		151 Watts
	Difference: 61 Watts (68%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 5850 will be 21% faster than the GeForce GTX 950 in general, because of its higher data rate. (explain)

Radeon HD 5850		128000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 950		105728 MB/sec
	Difference: 22272 (21%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5850 is a small bit (more or less 6%) better at texture filtering than the GeForce GTX 950. (explain)

Radeon HD 5850		52200 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 950		49152 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 3048 (6%)

Pixel Rate

If running with lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 950 is the winner, and very much so. (explain)

GeForce GTX 950		32768 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5850		23200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 9568 (41%)

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 largest amount of data (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface within a second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR memory, it 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 high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the 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 maximum number of pixels that the graphics chip can possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the card's 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 output rate is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.