GeForce GTX 590 vs GeForce GTX 780 Ti

Intro

The GeForce GTX 590 has a clock frequency of 607 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 855 MHz. It also uses a 384-bit memory bus, and uses a 40 nm design. It is made up of 512 SPUs, 64 Texture Address Units, and 48 ROPs.

Compare those specifications to the GeForce GTX 780 Ti, which makes use of a 28 nm design. nVidia has clocked the core frequency at 875 MHz. The GDDR5 memory is set to run at a frequency of 1750 MHz on this model. It features 2880 SPUs as well as 240 TAUs and 48 ROPs.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the max amount of data (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This figure is worked out 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 processed in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the graphics card could possibly record to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.