GeForce GTX 460 SE vs GeForce GTX 570

Intro

Compare all that to the GeForce GTX 570, which uses a 40 nm design. nVidia has set the core speed at 732 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM runs at a frequency of 950 MHz on this particular card. It features 480 SPUs along with 60 Texture Address Units and 40 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 460 SE		150 Watts
GeForce GTX 570		219 Watts
	Difference: 69 Watts (46%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the GeForce GTX 570 should theoretically be a lot better than the GeForce GTX 460 SE in general. (explain)

GeForce GTX 570		152000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 460 SE		108800 MB/sec
	Difference: 43200 (40%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 570 should be quite a bit (more or less 41%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTX 460 SE. (explain)

GeForce GTX 570		43920 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 460 SE		31200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 12720 (41%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 570 will be much (about 41%) more effective at full screen anti-aliasing than the GeForce GTX 460 SE, and capable of handling higher screen resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

GeForce GTX 570		29280 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 460 SE		20800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 8480 (41%)

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 largest amount of information (measured in MB per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface in a second. It's worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be applied 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 higher the texel rate, the better the video card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics card can possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.