GeForce GTX 295 vs Radeon HD 5830

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 5830, which uses a 40 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 800 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM is set to run at a speed of 1000 MHz on this particular card. It features 1120(224x5) SPUs as well as 56 TAUs 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

Theoretically speaking, the GeForce GTX 295 is 75% quicker than the Radeon HD 5830 in general, due to its greater bandwidth. (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 (approximately 106%) more effective 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 running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 295 is the winner, by far. (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 max amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in a second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the video card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel fill rate also depends on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.