GeForce 8800 GTS (G80) 640MB vs Radeon HD 5750 512MB

Intro

The GeForce 8800 GTS (G80) 640MB features a clock frequency of 513 MHz and a GDDR3 memory speed of 792 MHz. It also uses a 320-bit bus, and makes use of a 90 nm design. It is comprised of 96 SPUs, 48 Texture Address Units, and 20 Raster Operation Units.

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 5750 512MB, which features a clock speed of 700 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1150 MHz. It also uses a 128-bit memory bus, and uses a 40 nm design. It is comprised of 720(144x5) SPUs, 36 Texture Address Units, and 16 ROPs.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the max amount of data (counted in megabytes per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in a second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the better 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 number of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the graphics card can possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.