GeForce GTX 590 vs Geforce GTX 680

Intro

Compare all of that to the Geforce GTX 680, which has clock speeds of 1006 MHz on the GPU, and 1502 MHz on the 2048 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 1536 SPUs as well as 128 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Benchmarks

These are real-world performance benchmarks that were submitted by Hardware Compare users. The scores seen here are the average of all benchmarks submitted for each respective test and hardware.

3DMark Fire Strike Graphics Score

Geforce GTX 680		7650 points
GeForce GTX 590		6680 points
	Difference: 970 (15%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Geforce GTX 680		195 Watts
GeForce GTX 590		365 Watts
	Difference: 170 Watts (87%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the GeForce GTX 590 should theoretically be a lot better than the Geforce GTX 680 overall. (explain)

GeForce GTX 590		328320 MB/sec
Geforce GTX 680		192256 MB/sec
	Difference: 136064 (71%)

Texel Rate

The Geforce GTX 680 is a lot (about 66%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTX 590. (explain)

Geforce GTX 680		128768 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 590		77696 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 51072 (66%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high resolution is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 590 is superior to the Geforce GTX 680, and very much so. (explain)

GeForce GTX 590		58272 Mpixels/sec
Geforce GTX 680		32192 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 26080 (81%)

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: Memory bandwidth is the max amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface within a second. It's calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR type memory, it must 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 anti-aliasing, 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 number is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the video card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the graphics card could possibly write to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.