GeForce 8800 GTS (G80) 640MB vs GeForce GTX 960M

Intro

The GeForce 8800 GTS (G80) 640MB comes with clock speeds of 513 MHz on the GPU, and 792 MHz on the 640 MB of GDDR3 memory. It features 96 SPUs as well as 48 Texture Address Units and 20 Rasterization Operator Units.

Compare those specifications to the GeForce GTX 960M, which comes with GPU clock speed of 1096 MHz, and 2048 MB of GDDR5 RAM running at 1000 MHz through a 128-bit bus. It also is comprised of 640 Stream Processors, 40 Texture Address Units, and 16 ROPs.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the largest amount of data (in units of MB per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface in one second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, the faster 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 number is worked out by multiplying the total texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the video card will be at handling 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 video card can possibly record to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka 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 - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.