GeForce GTX 285 1GB vs Radeon HD 5870

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 5870, which has core speeds of 850 MHz on the GPU, and 1200 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 1600(320x5) SPUs as well as 80 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 5870		188 Watts
GeForce GTX 285 1GB		204 Watts
	Difference: 16 Watts (9%)

Memory Bandwidth

The GeForce GTX 285 1GB should theoretically be just a bit faster than the Radeon HD 5870 overall. (explain)

GeForce GTX 285 1GB		158976 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5870		153600 MB/sec
	Difference: 5376 (4%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5870 should be a lot (more or less 31%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTX 285 1GB. (explain)

Radeon HD 5870		68000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 285 1GB		51840 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 16160 (31%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 5870 should be a lot (about 31%) more effective at AA than the GeForce GTX 285 1GB, and should be capable of handling higher screen resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

Radeon HD 5870		27200 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 285 1GB		20736 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 6464 (31%)

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 information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface within a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR type memory, it must 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 AA, HDR 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 of the card by the core speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip could possibly write to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.