GeForce GTX 590 vs Radeon HD 7850

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 7850, which comes with a core clock speed of 860 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1200 MHz. It also makes use of a 256-bit memory bus, and uses 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

As far as performance goes, the GeForce GTX 590 should theoretically be a lot superior to the Radeon HD 7850 overall. (explain)

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

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 590 is a lot (about 41%) better at AF than the Radeon HD 7850. (explain)

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

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 590 will be quite a bit (about 112%) better at full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 7850, and also will be capable of handling higher screen resolutions while still performing well. (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: Memory bandwidth is the max amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface within a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card could possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number 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 drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.