GeForce GTX 580 vs Radeon HD 4870 X2

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 4870 X2, which comes with a clock speed of 750 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 900 MHz. It also makes use of a 256-bit memory bus, and uses a 55 nm design. It is comprised of 800(160x5) SPUs, 40 Texture Address Units, and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 580		244 Watts
Radeon HD 4870 X2		350 Watts
	Difference: 106 Watts (43%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon HD 4870 X2 should in theory be a bit better than the GeForce GTX 580 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 4870 X2		230400 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 580		192384 MB/sec
	Difference: 38016 (20%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 4870 X2 should be a lot (more or less 21%) more effective at AF than the GeForce GTX 580. (explain)

Radeon HD 4870 X2		60000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 580		49408 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 10592 (21%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 580 will be a lot (more or less 54%) better at FSAA than the Radeon HD 4870 X2, and also able to handle higher screen resolutions better. (explain)

GeForce GTX 580		37056 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4870 X2		24000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 13056 (54%)

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 maximum amount of information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that are processed in one second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the video card will be at handling 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 chip could possibly write to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.