GeForce GTX 580 vs Radeon HD 7850

Intro

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

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

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

Radeon HD 7850		5200 points
GeForce GTX 580		4956 points
	Difference: 244 (5%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

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

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the GeForce GTX 580 should theoretically be a lot better than the Radeon HD 7850 in general. (explain)

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

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7850 should be just a bit (more or less 11%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTX 580. (explain)

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

Pixel Rate

If using a high screen resolution is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 580 is superior to the Radeon HD 7850, and very much so. (explain)

GeForce GTX 580		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 (counted in MB per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed in one second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total amount 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 in a second.

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