GeForce GTX 580 3GB vs Radeon R9 270

Intro

The GeForce GTX 580 3GB makes use of a 40 nm design. nVidia has clocked the core frequency at 772 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM works at a frequency of 1002 MHz on this particular model. It features 512 SPUs as well as 64 Texture Address Units and 48 Rasterization Operator Units.

Compare that to the Radeon R9 270, which makes use of a 28 nm design. AMD has set the core frequency at 900 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM is set to run at a frequency of 1400 MHz on this particular model. It features 1280 SPUs along with 80 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the maximum amount of information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. If it uses 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 anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are processed in one second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the graphics card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card can possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.