GeForce GTX 480 vs Radeon HD 5870

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 5870, which comes with GPU clock speed of 850 MHz, and 1024 MB of GDDR5 memory running at 1200 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is made up of 1600(320x5) SPUs, 80 Texture Address Units, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 5870		188 Watts
GeForce GTX 480		250 Watts
	Difference: 62 Watts (33%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the GeForce GTX 480 should theoretically be just a bit better than the Radeon HD 5870 overall. (explain)

GeForce GTX 480		177408 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5870		153600 MB/sec
	Difference: 23808 (16%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5870 is a lot (approximately 62%) more effective at AF than the GeForce GTX 480. (explain)

Radeon HD 5870		68000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 480		42000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 26000 (62%)

Pixel Rate

If running with lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 480 is superior to the Radeon HD 5870, by far. (explain)

GeForce GTX 480		33600 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5870		27200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 6400 (24%)

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 largest amount of data (counted in MB per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in a second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, 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 number of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better this number, 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 most pixels the graphics card could possibly record to its 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 core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.