GeForce GTX 580 vs Radeon HD 6990

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 6990, which comes with GPU clock speed of 830 MHz, and 2048 MB of GDDR5 memory set to run at 1250 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is made up of 1536 Stream Processors, 96 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 6990		5820 points
GeForce GTX 580		4956 points
	Difference: 864 (17%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 580		244 Watts
Radeon HD 6990		375 Watts
	Difference: 131 Watts (54%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 6990 should in theory perform much faster than the GeForce GTX 580 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 6990		320000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 580		192384 MB/sec
	Difference: 127616 (66%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6990 is quite a bit (approximately 223%) more effective at texture filtering than the GeForce GTX 580. (explain)

Radeon HD 6990		159360 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 580		49408 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 109952 (223%)

Pixel Rate

If using lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6990 is a better choice, by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 6990		53120 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 580		37056 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 16064 (43%)

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 data (counted in MB per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface within a second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR type memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly write to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the the core 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 output rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.