GeForce 8800 GTS (G80) 640MB vs Radeon HD 6450 (OEM) 1GB

Intro

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

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 6450 (OEM) 1GB, which comes with GPU clock speed of 750 MHz, and 1024 MB of GDDR5 memory set to run at 900 MHz through a 64-bit bus. It also is made up of 160 Stream Processors, 8 Texture Address Units, and 4 ROPs.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the max amount of information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface within a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the video card could possibly record to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of colour ROPs 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 rate is also dependant 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 maximum fill rate.