GeForce GTX 580 vs Radeon HD 6870

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 6870, which features core clock speeds of 900 MHz on the GPU, and 1050 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 1120 SPUs along with 56 Texture Address Units and 32 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
Radeon HD 6870		2870 points
	Difference: 2086 (73%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 6870		151 Watts
GeForce GTX 580		244 Watts
	Difference: 93 Watts (62%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the GeForce GTX 580 should be much faster than the Radeon HD 6870 overall. (explain)

GeForce GTX 580		192384 MB/sec
Radeon HD 6870		134400 MB/sec
	Difference: 57984 (43%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6870 is a small bit (more or less 2%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTX 580. (explain)

Radeon HD 6870		50400 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 580		49408 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 992 (2%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high screen resolution is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 580 is a better choice, by far. (explain)

GeForce GTX 580		37056 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 6870		28800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 8256 (29%)

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 maximum amount of information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in a second. The number 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 ANOTHER 2x. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the graphics card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the graphics card could possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.