GeForce GTX 580 3GB vs Radeon HD 4870 X2

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 4870 X2, which has core clock speeds of 750 MHz on the GPU, and 900 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 800(160x5) SPUs along with 40 TAUs and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 580 3GB		244 Watts
Radeon HD 4870 X2		350 Watts
	Difference: 106 Watts (43%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon HD 4870 X2 should theoretically be a small bit superior to the GeForce GTX 580 3GB in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 4870 X2		230400 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 580 3GB		192384 MB/sec
	Difference: 38016 (20%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 4870 X2 should be quite a bit (about 21%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTX 580 3GB. (explain)

Radeon HD 4870 X2		60000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 580 3GB		49408 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 10592 (21%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high screen resolution is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 580 3GB is a better choice, by a large margin. (explain)

GeForce GTX 580 3GB		37056 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4870 X2		24000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 13056 (54%)

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: Bandwidth is the largest amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transported past 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 RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total texture units by the core clock 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 applied per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip could possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the clock speed of the card. 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 rate is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.