GeForce GTX 580 3GB vs Radeon HD 7950

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 7950, which has a GPU core clock speed of 800 MHz, and 1536 MB of GDDR5 RAM set to run at 1250 MHz through a 384-bit bus. It also is comprised of 1792 Stream Processors, 112 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 7950		200 Watts
GeForce GTX 580 3GB		244 Watts
	Difference: 44 Watts (22%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 7950 should theoretically be much faster than the GeForce GTX 580 3GB overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 7950		240000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 580 3GB		192384 MB/sec
	Difference: 47616 (25%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7950 will be much (more or less 81%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTX 580 3GB. (explain)

Radeon HD 7950		89600 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 580 3GB		49408 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 40192 (81%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 580 3GB is the winner, and very much so. (explain)

GeForce GTX 580 3GB		37056 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 7950		25600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 11456 (45%)

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: Bandwidth is the max amount of information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface within a second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses 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 texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total texture units by the core speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, 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 the graphics card can possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.