GeForce GTX 580 3GB vs Radeon HD 7850

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 7850, which features core clock speeds of 860 MHz on the GPU, and 1200 MHz on the 2048 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 1024 SPUs along with 64 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 7850		130 Watts
GeForce GTX 580 3GB		244 Watts
	Difference: 114 Watts (88%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the GeForce GTX 580 3GB should be a lot faster than the Radeon HD 7850 in general. (explain)

GeForce GTX 580 3GB		192384 MB/sec
Radeon HD 7850		153600 MB/sec
	Difference: 38784 (25%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7850 is a bit (about 11%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTX 580 3GB. (explain)

Radeon HD 7850		55040 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 580 3GB		49408 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 5632 (11%)

Pixel Rate

If using lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 580 3GB is a better choice, and very much so. (explain)

GeForce GTX 580 3GB		37056 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 7850		27520 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 9536 (35%)

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 maximum amount of information (in units of MB per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR RAM, the result should 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 high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the graphics card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the graphics card could possibly record to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.