GeForce 8800 GTS (G80) 320MB vs Geforce GTX 780

Intro

The GeForce 8800 GTS (G80) 320MB makes use of a 90 nm design. nVidia has clocked the core speed at 513 MHz. The GDDR3 memory is set to run at a speed of 792 MHz on this card. It features 96 SPUs along with 48 Texture Address Units and 20 Rasterization Operator Units.

Compare that to the Geforce GTX 780, which features GPU clock speed of 863 MHz, and 3072 MB of GDDR5 RAM running at 1502 MHz through a 384-bit bus. It also is comprised of 2304 Stream Processors, 192 Texture Address Units, and 48 ROPs.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the maximum amount of information (in units of MB per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in a second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR type memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the card's memory bandwidth, 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the video card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the video card could possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel output rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.