GeForce GTX 460 (OEM) vs Radeon HD 5850

Intro

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

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 460 (OEM)		150 Watts
Radeon HD 5850		151 Watts
	Difference: 1 Watts (1%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 5850 is 18% faster than the GeForce GTX 460 (OEM) overall, because of its higher data rate. (explain)

Radeon HD 5850		128000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 460 (OEM)		108800 MB/sec
	Difference: 19200 (18%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5850 is a lot (more or less 43%) more effective at AF than the GeForce GTX 460 (OEM). (explain)

Radeon HD 5850		52200 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 460 (OEM)		36400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 15800 (43%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 5850 is superior to the GeForce GTX 460 (OEM), though not by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 5850		23200 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 460 (OEM)		20800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 2400 (12%)

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: Memory bandwidth is the max amount of data (in units of MB per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface within a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that are processed in one second. This is worked out by multiplying the total texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the card will be at 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 the video card could possibly write to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel fill rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.