GeForce 8800 Ultra vs Radeon HD 5850

Intro

The GeForce 8800 Ultra comes with a GPU core clock speed of 612 MHz, and the 768 MB of GDDR3 RAM is set to run at 1080 MHz through a 384-bit bus. It also features 128 SPUs, 64 Texture Address Units, and 24 Raster Operation Units.

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 5850, which comes with a core clock frequency of 725 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1000 MHz. It also makes use of a 256-bit memory bus, and makes use of a 40 nm design. It features 1440(288x5) SPUs, 72 Texture Address Units, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Price Comparison

Please note that the price comparisons are based on search keywords, and might not be the exact same card listed on this page. We have no control over the accuracy of their search results.

GeForce 8800 Ultra Amazon.com Other US-based stores Amazon.co.uk Amazon.de Amazon.fr

Radeon HD 5850 Amazon.com Other US-based stores Amazon.co.uk Amazon.de Amazon.fr

Specifications

Model	GeForce 8800 Ultra	Radeon HD 5850
Manufacturer	nVidia	ATi
Year	May 2007	September 30, 2009
Code Name	G80	Cypress PRO
Fab Process	90 nm	40 nm
Bus	PCIe x16	PCIe 2.1 x16
Memory	768 MB	1024 MB
Core Speed	612 MHz	725 MHz
Shader Speed	1500 MHz	(N/A) MHz
Memory Speed	1080 MHz	1000 MHz
Unified Shaders	128	1440(288x5)
Texture Mapping Units	64	72
Render Output Units	24	32
Bus Type	GDDR3	GDDR5
Bus Width	384-bit	256-bit
DirectX Version	DirectX 10	DirectX 11
OpenGL Version	OpenGL 3.0	OpenGL 3.2
Power (Max TDP)	171 watts	151 watts
Shader Model	4.0	5.0
Bandwidth	103680 MB/sec	128000 MB/sec
Texel Rate	39168 Mtexels/sec	52200 Mtexels/sec
Pixel Rate	14688 Mpixels/sec	23200 Mpixels/sec

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the maximum amount of information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface within a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied in one second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the graphics 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 most pixels the graphics card could possibly record to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate is also dependant on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.