GeForce 8800 GT 512MB vs Radeon HD 7770

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 7770, which features GPU clock speed of 1000 MHz, and 1024 MB of GDDR5 RAM running at 1125 MHz through a 128-bit bus. It also is made up of 640 Stream Processors, 40 TAUs, and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 7770		80 Watts
GeForce 8800 GT 512MB		105 Watts
	Difference: 25 Watts (31%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon HD 7770 should in theory be much better than the GeForce 8800 GT 512MB in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 7770		72000 MB/sec
GeForce 8800 GT 512MB		57600 MB/sec
	Difference: 14400 (25%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7770 should be a little bit (about 19%) more effective at AF than the GeForce 8800 GT 512MB. (explain)

Radeon HD 7770		40000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 8800 GT 512MB		33600 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 6400 (19%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 7770 should be quite a bit (approximately 67%) more effective at anti-aliasing than the GeForce 8800 GT 512MB, and also should be capable of handling higher resolutions while still performing well. (explain)

Radeon HD 7770		16000 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 8800 GT 512MB		9600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 6400 (67%)

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 max amount of information (counted in MB per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface within a second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card can possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the card's clock speed. 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 output rate also depends on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.