GeForce GTX 580 vs Radeon HD 4870 X2

Intro

The GeForce GTX 580 features core clock speeds of 772 MHz on the GPU, and 1002 MHz on the 1536 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 512 SPUs along with 64 Texture Address Units and 48 ROPs.

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 4870 X2, which makes use of a 55 nm design. ATi has clocked the core frequency at 750 MHz. The GDDR5 memory runs at a speed of 900 MHz on this specific card. It features 800(160x5) SPUs along with 40 Texture Address Units and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Price Comparison

Please note that the price comparisons are based on search keywords, and might not be the exact same card listed on this page. We have no control over the accuracy of their search results.

GeForce GTX 580 Amazon.com Other US-based stores Amazon.co.uk Amazon.de Amazon.fr

Radeon HD 4870 X2 Amazon.com Other US-based stores Amazon.co.uk Amazon.de Amazon.fr

Specifications

Model	GeForce GTX 580	Radeon HD 4870 X2
Manufacturer	nVidia	ATi
Year	November 2010	Aug 12, 2008
Code Name	GF110	R700
Fab Process	40 nm	55 nm
Bus	PCIe x16	PCIe 2.0 x16 (PCIe bridge)
Memory	1536 MB	1024 MB (x2)
Core Speed	772 MHz	750 MHz (x2)
Shader Speed	1544 MHz	(N/A) MHz (x2)
Memory Speed	1002 MHz	900 MHz (x2)
Unified Shaders	512	800(160x5) (x2)
Texture Mapping Units	64	40 (x2)
Render Output Units	48	16 (x2)
Bus Type	GDDR5	GDDR5
Bus Width	384-bit	256-bit (x2)
DirectX Version	DirectX 11	DirectX 10.1
OpenGL Version	OpenGL 4.1	OpenGL 3.0
Power (Max TDP)	244 watts	350 watts
Shader Model	5.0	4.1
Bandwidth	192384 MB/sec	230400 MB/sec
Texel Rate	49408 Mtexels/sec	60000 Mtexels/sec
Pixel Rate	37056 Mpixels/sec	24000 Mpixels/sec

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the largest amount of information (measured in MB per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in one second. It is worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR type memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the memory bandwidth, the better 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the video card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card could possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.