GeForce GTX 260 vs GeForce GTX 480

Intro

Compare those specs to the GeForce GTX 480, which has a core clock speed of 700 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 924 MHz. It also features a 384-bit memory bus, and makes use of a 40 nm design. It is made up of 480 SPUs, 60 Texture Address Units, and 48 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 260		182 Watts
GeForce GTX 480		250 Watts
	Difference: 68 Watts (37%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the GeForce GTX 480 should be 59% faster than the GeForce GTX 260 overall, because of its higher bandwidth. (explain)

GeForce GTX 480		177408 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 260		111888 MB/sec
	Difference: 65520 (59%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 480 is a little bit (about 14%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTX 260. (explain)

GeForce GTX 480		42000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 260		36864 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 5136 (14%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high resolution is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 480 is the winner, by a large margin. (explain)

GeForce GTX 480		33600 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 260		16128 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 17472 (108%)

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 maximum amount of information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface within a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR RAM, it should 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that are processed in one second. This is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the graphics card can possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.