GeForce GTX 480 vs GeForce GTX 580

Intro

Compare those specs to the GeForce GTX 580, which makes use of a 40 nm design. nVidia has clocked the core speed at 772 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM is set to run at a frequency of 1002 MHz on this card. It features 512 SPUs along with 64 Texture Address Units and 48 ROPs.

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

GeForce GTX 580		4956 points
GeForce GTX 480		3650 points
	Difference: 1306 (36%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 580		244 Watts
GeForce GTX 480		250 Watts
	Difference: 6 Watts (2%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the GeForce GTX 580 should in theory be a bit better than the GeForce GTX 480 overall. (explain)

GeForce GTX 580		192384 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 480		177408 MB/sec
	Difference: 14976 (8%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 580 is a little bit (more or less 18%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTX 480. (explain)

GeForce GTX 580		49408 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 480		42000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 7408 (18%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 580 is a little bit (approximately 10%) faster with regards to AA than the GeForce GTX 480, and also will be capable of handling higher resolutions more effectively. (explain)

GeForce GTX 580		37056 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 480		33600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 3456 (10%)

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 data (in units of MB per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface in one second. It is calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR type memory, 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 anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the graphics 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 the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.