GeForce 8300 GS (OEM) vs Radeon HD 7970

Intro

The GeForce 8300 GS (OEM) has a GPU core clock speed of 450 MHz, and the 128 MB of DDR2 RAM runs at 400 MHz through a 64-bit bus. It also is made up of 8 SPUs, 4 Texture Address Units, and 2 Raster Operation Units.

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 7970, which has clock speeds of 925 MHz on the GPU, and 1375 MHz on the 3072 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 2048 SPUs along with 128 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator 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 8300 GS (OEM) Amazon.com Other US-based stores Amazon.co.uk Amazon.de Amazon.fr

Radeon HD 7970 Amazon.com Other US-based stores Amazon.co.uk Amazon.de Amazon.fr

Specifications

Model	GeForce 8300 GS (OEM)	Radeon HD 7970
Manufacturer	nVidia	ATi
Year	July 2007	January 2012
Code Name	G86	Tahiti XT
Fab Process	80 nm	28 nm
Bus	PCI Express x16	PCIe 3.0 x16
Memory	128 MB	3072 MB
Core Speed	450 MHz	925 MHz
Shader Speed	900 MHz	(N/A) MHz
Memory Speed	400 MHz (800 MHz effective)	1375 MHz (5500 MHz effective)
Unified Shaders	8	2048
Texture Mapping Units	4	128
Render Output Units	2	32
Bus Type	DDR2	GDDR5
Bus Width	64-bit	384-bit
DirectX Version	DirectX 10	DirectX 11.1
OpenGL Version	OpenGL 3.0	OpenGL 4.2
Power (Max TDP)	40 watts	250 watts
Shader Model	4.0	5.0
Bandwidth	6400 MB/sec	264000 MB/sec
Texel Rate	1800 Mtexels/sec	118400 Mtexels/sec
Pixel Rate	900 Mpixels/sec	29600 Mpixels/sec

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the largest amount of information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in a second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the faster 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 number of texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core 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 in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the graphics card could possibly record to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.