GeForce 9800 GTX vs GeForce GTX 580

Intro

Compare those specs to the GeForce GTX 580, which uses a 40 nm design. nVidia has clocked the core speed at 772 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM works at a frequency of 1002 MHz on this particular model. It features 512 SPUs as well as 64 Texture Address Units and 48 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 9800 GTX		140 Watts
GeForce GTX 580		244 Watts
	Difference: 104 Watts (74%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the GeForce GTX 580 should be quite a bit faster than the GeForce 9800 GTX overall. (explain)

GeForce GTX 580		192384 MB/sec
GeForce 9800 GTX		70400 MB/sec
	Difference: 121984 (173%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 580 should be a small bit (more or less 14%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce 9800 GTX. (explain)

GeForce GTX 580		49408 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 9800 GTX		43200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 6208 (14%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 580 is quite a bit (more or less 243%) faster with regards to full screen anti-aliasing than the GeForce 9800 GTX, and also should be able to handle higher resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

GeForce GTX 580		37056 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 9800 GTX		10800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 26256 (243%)

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: Bandwidth is the largest amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface in one second. It's calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, the better 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 are processed per 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 this number, the better the video card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics chip can possibly record to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.