GeForce GTX 580 vs Geforce GTX 670

Intro

The GeForce GTX 580 comes with a clock speed of 772 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1002 MHz. It also uses a 384-bit bus, and makes use of a 40 nm design. It is comprised of 512 SPUs, 64 TAUs, and 48 ROPs.

Compare that to the Geforce GTX 670, which features GPU core speed of 915 MHz, and 2048 MB of GDDR5 memory set to run at 1500 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is made up of 1344 Stream Processors, 112 TAUs, and 32 ROPs.

Price Comparison

GeForce GTX 580 Amazon.com

Geforce GTX 670 Amazon.com

Please note that the price comparisons are based on search keywords - sometimes it might show cards with very similar names that are not exactly the same as the one chosen in the comparison. We do try to filter out the wrong results as best we can, though.

Specifications

Model	GeForce GTX 580	Geforce GTX 670
Manufacturer	nVidia	nVidia
Year	November 2010	May 2012
Code Name	GF110	GK104
Fab Process	40 nm	28 nm
Bus	PCIe x16	PCIe 3.0 x16
Memory	1536 MB	2048 MB
Core Speed	772 MHz	915 MHz
Shader Speed	1544 MHz	915 MHz
Memory Speed	1002 MHz (4008 MHz effective)	1500 MHz (6000 MHz effective)
Unified Shaders	512	1344
Texture Mapping Units	64	112
Render Output Units	48	32
Bus Type	GDDR5	GDDR5
Bus Width	384-bit	256-bit
DirectX Version	DirectX 11	DirectX 11.0
OpenGL Version	OpenGL 4.1	OpenGL 4.2
Power (Max TDP)	244 watts	170 watts
Shader Model	5.0	5.0
Bandwidth	192384 MB/sec	192000 MB/sec
Texel Rate	49408 Mtexels/sec	102480 Mtexels/sec
Pixel Rate	37056 Mpixels/sec	29280 Mpixels/sec

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the largest amount of information (counted in MB per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface within a second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, 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 are processed per second. This is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the video card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card can possibly write to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.