GeForce GTX 580 vs Radeon R9 270

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon R9 270, which features a GPU core clock speed of 900 MHz, and 2048 MB of GDDR5 RAM running at 1400 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also features 1280 SPUs, 80 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

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

Theoretically speaking, the GeForce GTX 580 is 7% quicker than the Radeon R9 270 in general, because of its greater bandwidth. (explain)

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

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 270 should be quite a bit (more or less 46%) better at texture 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 should be a lot (more or less 29%) more effective at full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon R9 270, and also capable of handling higher resolutions more effectively. (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: Bandwidth is the max amount of information (measured in MB per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in a second. It is calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed in one second. This is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core clock 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 processed in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the video card could possibly write to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of colour ROPs 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 rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.