GeForce GTX 580 vs Radeon HD 4850 X2 512MB

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 4850 X2 512MB, which has clock speeds of 625 MHz on the GPU, and 993 MHz on the 512 MB of GDDR3 memory. It features 800(160x5) SPUs along with 40 Texture Address Units and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 580		244 Watts
Radeon HD 4850 X2 512MB		250 Watts
	Difference: 6 Watts (2%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the GeForce GTX 580 is 51% quicker than the Radeon HD 4850 X2 512MB overall, due to its higher data rate. (explain)

GeForce GTX 580		192384 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4850 X2 512MB		127104 MB/sec
	Difference: 65280 (51%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 4850 X2 512MB will be just a bit (approximately 1%) better at texture filtering than the GeForce GTX 580. (explain)

Radeon HD 4850 X2 512MB		50000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 580		49408 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 592 (1%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 580 will be much (about 85%) more effective at full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 4850 X2 512MB, and also should be able to handle higher resolutions while still performing well. (explain)

GeForce GTX 580		37056 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4850 X2 512MB		20000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 17056 (85%)

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.

One or more cards in this comparison are multi-core. This means that their bandwidth, texel and pixel rates are theoretically doubled - this does not mean the card will actually perform twice as fast, but only that it should in theory be able to. Actual game benchmarks will give a more accurate idea of what it's capable of.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the max amount of data (measured in MB per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface in a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the better 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 number of texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one second. This is worked out by multiplying the total texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the graphics 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 record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number 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 output rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.