GeForce GTX 580 vs Radeon HD 7870 XT

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 7870 XT, which makes use of a 28 nm design. AMD has set the core frequency at 925 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM works at a speed of 1500 MHz on this specific card. It features 1536 SPUs along with 96 TAUs and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

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 7870 XT		6390 points
GeForce GTX 580		4956 points
	Difference: 1434 (29%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 7870 XT		185 Watts
GeForce GTX 580		244 Watts
	Difference: 59 Watts (32%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the GeForce GTX 580 should perform a small bit faster than the Radeon HD 7870 XT in general. (explain)

GeForce GTX 580		192384 MB/sec
Radeon HD 7870 XT		192000 MB/sec
	Difference: 384 (0%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7870 XT is a lot (approximately 80%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTX 580. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870 XT		88800 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 580		49408 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 39392 (80%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 580 is quite a bit (more or less 25%) faster with regards to full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 7870 XT, and also capable of handling higher screen resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

GeForce GTX 580		37056 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 7870 XT		29600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 7456 (25%)

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.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the max amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface within a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once 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 anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

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

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