GeForce 8800 GTX vs GeForce 8800 Ultra

Intro

Compare all of that to the GeForce 8800 Ultra, which has core clock speeds of 612 MHz on the GPU, and 1080 MHz on the 768 MB of GDDR3 memory. It features 128 SPUs along with 64 TAUs and 24 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 8800 GTX		155 Watts
GeForce 8800 Ultra		171 Watts
	Difference: 16 Watts (10%)

Memory Bandwidth

The GeForce 8800 Ultra should in theory be just a bit faster than the GeForce 8800 GTX overall. (explain)

GeForce 8800 Ultra		103680 MB/sec
GeForce 8800 GTX		86400 MB/sec
	Difference: 17280 (20%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce 8800 Ultra is a bit (about 6%) better at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce 8800 GTX. (explain)

GeForce 8800 Ultra		39168 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 8800 GTX		36800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 2368 (6%)

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the GeForce 8800 Ultra is the winner, though only just barely. (explain)

GeForce 8800 Ultra		14688 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 8800 GTX		13800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 888 (6%)

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 maximum amount of information (in units of MB per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface in a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This is calculated by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the video card will be at 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 the video card could possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.