GeForce GTX 580 vs Radeon HD 6970

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 6970, which uses a 40 nm design. AMD has set the core speed at 880 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM runs at a speed of 1375 MHz on this particular model. It features 1536 SPUs along with 96 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

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

GeForce GTX 580		4956 points
Radeon HD 6970		3470 points
	Difference: 1486 (43%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 580		244 Watts
Radeon HD 6970		250 Watts
	Difference: 6 Watts (2%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the GeForce GTX 580 should in theory be just a bit superior to the Radeon HD 6970 in general. (explain)

GeForce GTX 580		192384 MB/sec
Radeon HD 6970		176000 MB/sec
	Difference: 16384 (9%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6970 should be much (approximately 71%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTX 580. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		84480 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 580		49408 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 35072 (71%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high screen resolution is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 580 is superior to the Radeon HD 6970, by a large margin. (explain)

GeForce GTX 580		37056 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 6970		28160 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 8896 (32%)

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 megabytes per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This figure is calculated 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 one second.

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