GeForce 8800 GS vs GeForce 9600 GSO 384MB

Intro

Compare that to the GeForce 9600 GSO 384MB, which features clock speeds of 550 MHz on the GPU, and 800 MHz on the 384 MB of GDDR3 RAM. It features 96 SPUs as well as 48 Texture Address Units and 12 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 9600 GSO 384MB		84 Watts
GeForce 8800 GS		105 Watts
	Difference: 21 Watts (25%)

Memory Bandwidth

Both cards have the exact same bandwidth, so theoretically they should have the same performance. (explain)

Texel Rate

Both cards have the exact same texel fill rate, so in theory they should perform equally good at at anisotropic filtering. (explain)

Pixel Rate

Both cards have the exact same pixel fill rate, so theoretically they should be equally good at at full screen anti-aliasing, and be able to handle the same resolutions. (explain)

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 max amount of information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface within a second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics chip can possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the clock speed of the card. 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 fill rate is also dependant on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.