GeForce 8800 GTS (G80) 320MB vs GeForce 9800 GTX

Intro

The GeForce 8800 GTS (G80) 320MB makes use of a 90 nm design. nVidia has set the core frequency at 513 MHz. The GDDR3 memory is set to run at a speed of 792 MHz on this model. It features 96 SPUs as well as 48 Texture Address Units and 20 Rasterization Operator Units.

Compare those specs to the GeForce 9800 GTX, which comes with a clock speed of 675 MHz and a GDDR3 memory speed of 1100 MHz. It also uses a 256-bit bus, and uses a 65 nm design. It is comprised of 128 SPUs, 64 Texture Address Units, and 16 ROPs.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the max amount of information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface within a second. It is worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If 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 high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the graphics card can possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.