GeForce 8800 GTX vs GeForce GTX 580 3GB

Intro

Compare those specifications to the GeForce GTX 580 3GB, which comes with clock speeds of 772 MHz on the GPU, and 1002 MHz on the 3072 MB of GDDR5 RAM. 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 8800 GTX		155 Watts
GeForce GTX 580 3GB		244 Watts
	Difference: 89 Watts (57%)

Memory Bandwidth

The GeForce GTX 580 3GB, in theory, should perform quite a bit faster than the GeForce 8800 GTX in general. (explain)

GeForce GTX 580 3GB		192384 MB/sec
GeForce 8800 GTX		86400 MB/sec
	Difference: 105984 (123%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 580 3GB will be a lot (approximately 34%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce 8800 GTX. (explain)

GeForce GTX 580 3GB		49408 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 8800 GTX		36800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 12608 (34%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 580 3GB is the winner, by a large margin. (explain)

GeForce GTX 580 3GB		37056 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 8800 GTX		13800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 23256 (169%)

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 (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in a second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the graphics 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 amount of pixels that the graphics card can 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 Render Output Units by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.