GeForce GTX 590 vs Geforce GTX 680

Intro

Compare all of that to the Geforce GTX 680, which comes with a clock frequency of 1006 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1502 MHz. It also makes use of a 256-bit memory bus, and uses a 28 nm design. It features 1536 SPUs, 128 Texture Address Units, and 32 ROPs.

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

Theoretically, the GeForce GTX 590 should be much faster than the Geforce GTX 680 in general. (explain)

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

Texel Rate

The Geforce GTX 680 is quite a bit (more or less 66%) better 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

The GeForce GTX 590 is a lot (approximately 81%) faster with regards to anti-aliasing than the Geforce GTX 680, and also able to handle higher screen resolutions without slowing down too much. (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 largest amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface in one second. It is calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics chip can possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of ROPs 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 output rate also depends 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.