GeForce GTX 590 vs Radeon HD 7850

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 7850, which comes with a clock speed of 860 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1200 MHz. It also uses a 256-bit memory bus, and makes use of a 28 nm design. It is made up of 1024 SPUs, 64 TAUs, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

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.

3DMark Fire Strike Graphics Score

GeForce GTX 590		6680 points
Radeon HD 7850		5200 points
	Difference: 1480 (28%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 7850		130 Watts
GeForce GTX 590		365 Watts
	Difference: 235 Watts (181%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the GeForce GTX 590 should perform a lot faster than the Radeon HD 7850 in general. (explain)

GeForce GTX 590		328320 MB/sec
Radeon HD 7850		153600 MB/sec
	Difference: 174720 (114%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 590 is much (about 41%) faster with regards to AF than the Radeon HD 7850. (explain)

GeForce GTX 590		77696 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 7850		55040 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 22656 (41%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 590 is a better choice, by far. (explain)

GeForce GTX 590		58272 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 7850		27520 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 30752 (112%)

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 (counted in megabytes per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface within a second. It is calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the video 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 maximum number of pixels that the graphics card can possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate is also dependant on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.