GeForce GTX 580 vs Radeon HD 6970

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 6970, which uses a 40 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 880 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM works at a speed of 1375 MHz on this model. It features 1536 SPUs as well as 96 TAUs 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

GeForce GTX 580		4956 points
Radeon HD 6970		3470 points
	Difference: 1486 (43%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 580		244 Watts
Radeon HD 6970		250 Watts
	Difference: 6 Watts (2%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the GeForce GTX 580 should theoretically be a small bit superior to the Radeon HD 6970 overall. (explain)

GeForce GTX 580		192384 MB/sec
Radeon HD 6970		176000 MB/sec
	Difference: 16384 (9%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6970 should be quite a bit (about 71%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTX 580. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		84480 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 580		49408 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 35072 (71%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high resolution 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 6970		28160 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 8896 (32%)

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 largest amount of information (in units of MB per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface within a second. It's worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR type memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per 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 the texel rate, the better the card will be at handling 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 can possibly record to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of ROPs 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 also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.