GeForce GTX 580 vs Radeon HD 5770

Intro

The GeForce GTX 580 makes use of a 40 nm design. nVidia has clocked the core speed at 772 MHz. The GDDR5 memory is set to run at a speed of 1002 MHz on this particular model. It features 512 SPUs as well as 64 Texture Address Units and 48 Rasterization Operator Units.

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 5770, which has a clock frequency of 850 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1200 MHz. It also makes use of a 128-bit bus, and uses a 40 nm design. It features 800(160x5) SPUs, 40 Texture Address Units, and 16 ROPs.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the maximum amount of information (counted in MB per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the video card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed per second.

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