GeForce GTX 470 vs GeForce GTX 580

Intro

Compare that to the GeForce GTX 580, which uses a 40 nm design. nVidia has set the core speed at 772 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM is set to run at a speed of 1002 MHz on this specific 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 470		2937 points
	Difference: 2019 (69%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 470		215 Watts
GeForce GTX 580		244 Watts
	Difference: 29 Watts (13%)

Memory Bandwidth

The GeForce GTX 580, in theory, should be a lot faster than the GeForce GTX 470 overall. (explain)

GeForce GTX 580		192384 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 470		133920 MB/sec
	Difference: 58464 (44%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 580 is a lot (more or less 45%) better at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTX 470. (explain)

GeForce GTX 580		49408 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 470		33992 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 15416 (45%)

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 580 is superior to the GeForce GTX 470, by a large margin. (explain)

GeForce GTX 580		37056 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 470		24280 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 12776 (53%)

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 max amount of information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface within a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the 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 number of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the video card will be at 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 the video card could possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.