NVIDIA GeForce GTX 470M vs GTX 570M

The maximum theoretical pixel fillrate is defined as the number of Raster Operations Pipelines (ROPs), multiplied by graphics clock rate. The GeForce GTX 570M has an upper hand here, as it runs at slightly higher frequency, and both graphics cards have the same number of ROPs. Better maximum pixel fill rate allows more pixels to be drawn on screen per second, which results in increased performance, unless there are bottlenecks somewhere else.

Since the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 570M graphics card has more Texture Mapping Units (TMUs) and insignificantly higher graphics clock, it has higher texture fillrate. Better texture fill rate means that the GPU can use more complex 3D effects and/or apply more textures to each texel, which improves visual appearance of games and generated images.

Single Precision performance is useful for estimating card's maximum speed in programs, that process primarily single-precision floating point data. The performance is expressed in GFLOPS, or Giga (billions of) Floating Point Operations Per Second. Since FP calculations are performed by shaders, CUDA cores or stream processors, the performance is directly proportional to their number. Processor clock rate also influences it. The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 570M graphics card is faster here. Higher single-precision performance number means the graphics card will perform better in general computing applications. Since stream processors or CUDA cores are also used as vertex and geometry shaders for 3D image generation, higher performance is also beneficial to games.

To speed up processing, the graphics cards store 3D scene data, textures and intermediate data, used for image generation, in on-board memory. The video memory usually has much higher bandwidth than system RAM, and more bandwidth allows the GPU to run at higher display resolutions, use larger and more detailed textures, and apply more complex 3D effects and filters. The bandwidth depends on a few components, such as memory type, speed, and width of memory interface. Specifically, the GeForce GTX 470M graphics card comes with wider memory bus. As a result, it has higher memory bandwidth.