GeForce GTX 580 vs Radeon HD 4870 512MB

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 4870 512MB, which has GPU clock speed of 750 MHz, and 512 MB of GDDR5 RAM running at 900 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is comprised of 800(160x5) Stream Processors, 40 TAUs, and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 4870 512MB		150 Watts
GeForce GTX 580		244 Watts
	Difference: 94 Watts (63%)

Memory Bandwidth

The GeForce GTX 580, in theory, should perform much faster than the Radeon HD 4870 512MB in general. (explain)

GeForce GTX 580		192384 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4870 512MB		115200 MB/sec
	Difference: 77184 (67%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 580 is much (about 65%) better at AF than the Radeon HD 4870 512MB. (explain)

GeForce GTX 580		49408 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4870 512MB		30000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 19408 (65%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high screen resolution is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 580 is superior to the Radeon HD 4870 512MB, and very much so. (explain)

GeForce GTX 580		37056 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4870 512MB		12000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 25056 (209%)

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 (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface within a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR type memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the 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 maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip 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 Render Output Units by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.