GeForce GTX 1050 vs GeForce GTX 590

Intro

The GeForce GTX 1050 makes use of a 14 nm design. nVidia has clocked the core frequency at 1354 MHz. The GDDR5 memory runs at a frequency of 1750 MHz on this particular model. It features 640 SPUs along with 40 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Compare those specs to the GeForce GTX 590, which features a clock speed of 607 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 855 MHz. It also uses a 384-bit memory bus, and uses a 40 nm design. It is made up of 512 SPUs, 64 Texture Address Units, and 48 Raster Operation Units.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the largest amount of information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in a second. It is worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total texture units by the core clock 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 in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly write to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number 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 filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.