GeForce GTX 295 vs Geforce GTX 680

Intro

The GeForce GTX 295 has a clock speed of 576 MHz and a GDDR3 memory speed of 999 MHz. It also features a 448-bit bus, and makes use of a 55 nm design. It features 240 SPUs, 80 Texture Address Units, and 28 Raster Operation Units.

Compare those specifications to the Geforce GTX 680, which features a clock frequency of 1006 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1502 MHz. It also makes use of a 256-bit memory bus, and uses a 28 nm design. It is made up of 1536 SPUs, 128 TAUs, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the max amount of information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface within a second. It's worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics card could possibly write to its local memory per 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 filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel output rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.