GeForce 8800 GTS (G80) 640MB vs Radeon HD 3850 1GB

Intro

The GeForce 8800 GTS (G80) 640MB makes use of a 90 nm design. nVidia has set the core speed at 513 MHz. The GDDR3 RAM is set to run at a frequency of 792 MHz on this specific model. It features 96 SPUs along with 48 Texture Address Units and 20 Rasterization Operator Units.

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 3850 1GB, which makes use of a 55 nm design. AMD has set the core speed at 668 MHz. The GDDR3 memory is set to run at a frequency of 828 MHz on this model. It features 320(64x5) SPUs as well as 16 Texture Address Units and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the max amount of information (measured in MB per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface in one second. It is calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed in one second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the graphics 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 maximum amount of pixels that the graphics card could possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.