GeForce GTX 580 vs Radeon R9 270

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon R9 270, which comes with a clock frequency of 900 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1400 MHz. It also features a 256-bit bus, and uses a 28 nm design. It is made up of 1280 SPUs, 80 Texture Address Units, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

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 R9 270		5943 points
GeForce GTX 580		4956 points
	Difference: 987 (20%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

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

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the GeForce GTX 580 should theoretically be a small bit superior to the Radeon R9 270 overall. (explain)

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

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 270 will be a lot (more or less 46%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTX 580. (explain)

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

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 580 is a lot (approximately 29%) faster with regards to FSAA than the Radeon R9 270, and also able to handle higher screen resolutions better. (explain)

GeForce GTX 580		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: Memory bandwidth is the maximum amount of data (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in one second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high 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 number of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the graphics card could possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.