NVIDIA GeForce GTX 560 vs Sapphire Radeon HD 5830 1GB GDDR5 PCIE (Game Edition)

There are two characteristics that influence the maximum pixel fillrate. They are the number of Raster Operations Pipelines (ROPs) and graphics frequency. The GeForce GTX 560 has a massive advantage in this area, as it runs at a bit higher rate and has twice as many ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines). Better maximum pixel fill rate allows more pixels to be drawn on screen per second, which results in increased graphics card performance, unless the GPU is limited by something else, such as texture fillrate, memory bandwidth or CPU speed.

Graphics unit performance in modern games is less dependent on pixel fillrate, and more on texture fill rate. There are two factors that affect this parameter. They are the number of TMUs (Texture Mapping Units) and graphics frequency. Since both GPUs have the same number of Texture Mapping Units (TMUs), and the GeForce GTX 560 is clocked slightly higher, it also has higher texture fillrate. Having better texture fill rate allows the card to apply more textures and/or utilize more sophisticated 3D effects for each texel, which improves games visual appearance.

Maximum Single Precision performance illustrates how fast the GPU is at running programs, that make an extensive use of single-precision floating point numbers. The performance is measured in GFLOPS, or Giga (billions of) Floating Point Operations Per Second. Generally, the faster stream processors or CUDA cores run at, and the more cores / processors the graphics card has, the higher Single Precision performance will be. The Sapphire Radeon HD 5830 1GB GDDR5 PCIE (Game Edition) graphics card is significantly faster here. Higher single-precision performance number means the GPU will perform better in general computing applications. Since CUDA cores or stream processors are also used as vertex and geometry shaders for 3D image generation, higher performance is also beneficial to games.

To speed up processing, the graphics cards store 3D scene data, textures and intermediate data, used for image generation, in on-board memory. The video memory usually has much higher bandwidth than system RAM, and more bandwidth allows the graphics card to run at higher display resolutions, use larger and more detailed textures, and apply more complex 3D effects and filters. The bandwidth depends on memory type, speed, and width of memory interface. Specifically, higher memory bandwidth of the GeForce GTX 560 is due to higher memory clock.