GeForce GTX 590 vs Radeon HD 7990

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 7990, which has clock speeds of 950 MHz on the GPU, and 1500 MHz on the 3072 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 2048 SPUs as well as 128 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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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 7990		15520 points
GeForce GTX 590		6680 points
	Difference: 8840 (132%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 590		365 Watts
Radeon HD 7990		375 Watts
	Difference: 10 Watts (3%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon HD 7990 should in theory be a lot superior to the GeForce GTX 590 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 7990		576000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 590		328320 MB/sec
	Difference: 247680 (75%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7990 will be a lot (about 213%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTX 590. (explain)

Radeon HD 7990		243200 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 590		77696 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 165504 (213%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 7990 is a better choice, but not by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 7990		60800 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 590		58272 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 2528 (4%)

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 max amount of data (counted in MB per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface within a second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once 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 AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip can possibly write to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.