GeForce GTX 580 3GB vs Geforce GTX 670

Intro

Compare all of that to the Geforce GTX 670, which features a clock frequency of 915 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1500 MHz. It also makes use of a 256-bit memory bus, and makes use of a 28 nm design. It is made up of 1344 SPUs, 112 Texture Address Units, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Geforce GTX 670		170 Watts
GeForce GTX 580 3GB		244 Watts
	Difference: 74 Watts (44%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the GeForce GTX 580 3GB should theoretically be a bit better than the Geforce GTX 670 overall. (explain)

GeForce GTX 580 3GB		192384 MB/sec
Geforce GTX 670		192000 MB/sec
	Difference: 384 (0%)

Texel Rate

The Geforce GTX 670 is quite a bit (approximately 107%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTX 580 3GB. (explain)

Geforce GTX 670		102480 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 580 3GB		49408 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 53072 (107%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high resolution is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 580 3GB is a better choice, by a large margin. (explain)

GeForce GTX 580 3GB		37056 Mpixels/sec
Geforce GTX 670		29280 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 7776 (27%)

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 data (measured in MB per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the better 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 per second. This is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core 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 per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card could possibly write to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the amount 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 - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.