GeForce GTX 580 vs Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB, which makes use of a 55 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 625 MHz. The GDDR3 memory runs at a frequency of 993 MHz on this card. It features 800(160x5) SPUs as well as 40 Texture Address Units and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 580		244 Watts
Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB		250 Watts
	Difference: 6 Watts (2%)

Memory Bandwidth

The GeForce GTX 580, in theory, should be much faster than the Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB overall. (explain)

GeForce GTX 580		192384 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB		127104 MB/sec
	Difference: 65280 (51%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB is just a bit (approximately 1%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTX 580. (explain)

Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB		50000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 580		49408 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 592 (1%)

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 580 is a better choice, by a large margin. (explain)

GeForce GTX 580		37056 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB		20000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 17056 (85%)

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 (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed in one second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the graphics card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip can possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as 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 max fill rate.