GeForce GTX 590 vs Radeon HD 7870 XT

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 7870 XT, which comes with core clock speeds of 925 MHz on the GPU, and 1500 MHz on the 2048 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 1536 SPUs along with 96 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 590		6680 points
Radeon HD 7870 XT		6390 points
	Difference: 290 (5%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 7870 XT		185 Watts
GeForce GTX 590		365 Watts
	Difference: 180 Watts (97%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the GeForce GTX 590 should in theory be quite a bit better than the Radeon HD 7870 XT in general. (explain)

GeForce GTX 590		328320 MB/sec
Radeon HD 7870 XT		192000 MB/sec
	Difference: 136320 (71%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7870 XT will be a small bit (approximately 14%) better at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTX 590. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870 XT		88800 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 590		77696 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 11104 (14%)

Pixel Rate

If using lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 590 is a better choice, by far. (explain)

GeForce GTX 590		58272 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 7870 XT		29600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 28672 (97%)

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 (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in a second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are processed in one second. This number 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 processed per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the video card could possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the card's 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 also depends on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.