GeForce GTX 580 3GB vs Radeon R9 270

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon R9 270, which has GPU core speed of 900 MHz, and 2048 MB of GDDR5 memory set to run at 1400 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is made up of 1280 Stream Processors, 80 Texture Address Units, and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R9 270		150 Watts
GeForce GTX 580 3GB		244 Watts
	Difference: 94 Watts (63%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the GeForce GTX 580 3GB should theoretically be a small bit better than the Radeon R9 270 in general. (explain)

GeForce GTX 580 3GB		192384 MB/sec
Radeon R9 270		179200 MB/sec
	Difference: 13184 (7%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 270 is a lot (approximately 46%) better at AF than the GeForce GTX 580 3GB. (explain)

Radeon R9 270		72000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 580 3GB		49408 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 22592 (46%)

Pixel Rate

If using lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 580 3GB is the winner, and very much so. (explain)

GeForce GTX 580 3GB		37056 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 270		28800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 8256 (29%)

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.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the max amount of information (in units of MB per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This is worked out by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the video 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 most pixels the graphics card can possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the card's clock speed. 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 many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.