GeForce GTX 580 vs Radeon HD 7850

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 7850, which comes with core speeds of 860 MHz on the GPU, and 1200 MHz on the 2048 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 1024 SPUs as well as 64 TAUs and 32 ROPs.

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

Radeon HD 7850		5200 points
GeForce GTX 580		4956 points
	Difference: 244 (5%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 7850		130 Watts
GeForce GTX 580		244 Watts
	Difference: 114 Watts (88%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the GeForce GTX 580 should theoretically be a lot better than the Radeon HD 7850 in general. (explain)

GeForce GTX 580		192384 MB/sec
Radeon HD 7850		153600 MB/sec
	Difference: 38784 (25%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7850 will be just a bit (approximately 11%) more effective at AF than the GeForce GTX 580. (explain)

Radeon HD 7850		55040 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 580		49408 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 5632 (11%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high resolution is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 580 is superior to the Radeon HD 7850, by far. (explain)

GeForce GTX 580		37056 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 7850		27520 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 9536 (35%)

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 maximum amount of data (in units of MB per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in one second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better 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 number of texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics card could possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.