GeForce 8800 GTS (G92) vs Radeon HD 6570 (OEM) 2GB

Intro

The GeForce 8800 GTS (G92) makes use of a 65 nm design. nVidia has clocked the core frequency at 650 MHz. The GDDR3 memory is set to run at a frequency of 970 MHz on this particular model. It features 128 SPUs along with 64 Texture Address Units and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 6570 (OEM) 2GB, which uses a 40 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 650 MHz. The GDDR5 memory is set to run at a frequency of 1000 MHz on this specific model. It features 480 SPUs along with 24 Texture Address Units and 8 ROPs.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the max amount of data (in units of MB per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in a second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, the faster 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied in one second. This is calculated by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the video 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 amount of pixels that the graphics card can possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.