GeForce GTX 580 vs Radeon HD 7990

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 7990, which uses a 28 nm design. AMD has set the core speed at 950 MHz. The GDDR5 memory is set to run at a speed of 1500 MHz on this card. It features 2048 SPUs along with 128 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 7990		15520 points
GeForce GTX 580		4956 points
	Difference: 10564 (213%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 580		244 Watts
Radeon HD 7990		375 Watts
	Difference: 131 Watts (54%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 7990 should be 199% quicker than the GeForce GTX 580 overall, due to its higher bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon HD 7990		576000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 580		192384 MB/sec
	Difference: 383616 (199%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7990 should be a lot (about 392%) better at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTX 580. (explain)

Radeon HD 7990		243200 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 580		49408 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 193792 (392%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 7990 should be much (approximately 64%) more effective at full screen anti-aliasing than the GeForce GTX 580, and able to handle higher resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

Radeon HD 7990		60800 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 580		37056 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 23744 (64%)

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 (counted in MB per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in one second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher 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 are applied per second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the graphics card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card can possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.