GeForce 8800 GTS (G80) 320MB vs GeForce GTX 580

Intro

Compare those specs to the GeForce GTX 580, which features GPU core speed of 772 MHz, and 1536 MB of GDDR5 memory running at 1002 MHz through a 384-bit bus. It also features 512 Stream Processors, 64 Texture Address Units, and 48 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 8800 GTS (G80) 320MB		143 Watts
GeForce GTX 580		244 Watts
	Difference: 101 Watts (71%)

Memory Bandwidth

The GeForce GTX 580 should in theory perform a lot faster than the GeForce 8800 GTS (G80) 320MB overall. (explain)

GeForce GTX 580		192384 MB/sec
GeForce 8800 GTS (G80) 320MB		63360 MB/sec
	Difference: 129024 (204%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 580 will be much (about 101%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the GeForce 8800 GTS (G80) 320MB. (explain)

GeForce GTX 580		49408 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 8800 GTS (G80) 320MB		24624 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 24784 (101%)

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA 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 8800 GTS (G80) 320MB		10260 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 26796 (261%)

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 information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in one second. It's worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card can possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.