GeForce GTX 580 vs Radeon HD 7970

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 7970, which comes with core clock speeds of 925 MHz on the GPU, and 1375 MHz on the 3072 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 2048 SPUs along with 128 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Benchmarks

These are real-world performance benchmarks that were submitted by Hardware Compare users. The scores seen here are the average of all benchmarks submitted for each respective test and hardware.

Grand Theft Auto V | 1920x1080 | Very High

Radeon HD 7970		37 FPS
GeForce GTX 580		25 FPS
	Difference: 12 (48%)

3DMark Fire Strike Graphics Score

Radeon HD 7970		8225 points
GeForce GTX 580		4956 points
	Difference: 3269 (66%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 580		244 Watts
Radeon HD 7970		250 Watts
	Difference: 6 Watts (2%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 7970 should perform a lot faster than the GeForce GTX 580 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		264000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 580		192384 MB/sec
	Difference: 71616 (37%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7970 should be a lot (approximately 140%) better at AF than the GeForce GTX 580. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		118400 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 580		49408 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 68992 (140%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 580 is a lot (about 25%) better at full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 7970, and also should be capable of handling higher resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

GeForce GTX 580		37056 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 7970		29600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 7456 (25%)

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 max amount of information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better 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 most pixels that the graphics chip can possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.