GeForce 9800 GX2 vs GeForce GTX 580

Intro

Compare all of that to the GeForce GTX 580, which uses a 40 nm design. nVidia has set the core frequency at 772 MHz. The GDDR5 memory works at a frequency of 1002 MHz on this particular card. It features 512 SPUs along with 64 Texture Address Units and 48 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 9800 GX2		197 Watts
GeForce GTX 580		244 Watts
	Difference: 47 Watts (24%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the GeForce GTX 580 should theoretically be quite a bit better than the GeForce 9800 GX2 overall. (explain)

GeForce GTX 580		192384 MB/sec
GeForce 9800 GX2		128000 MB/sec
	Difference: 64384 (50%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce 9800 GX2 will be much (about 55%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTX 580. (explain)

GeForce 9800 GX2		76800 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 580		49408 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 27392 (55%)

Pixel Rate

If using lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 580 is a better choice, by a large margin. (explain)

GeForce GTX 580		37056 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 9800 GX2		19200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 17856 (93%)

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: Memory bandwidth is the maximum amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in a second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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

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