GeForce 8800 Ultra vs Radeon HD 4870 512MB

Intro

The GeForce 8800 Ultra uses a 90 nm design. nVidia has set the core frequency at 612 MHz. The GDDR3 memory is set to run at a speed of 1080 MHz on this particular model. It features 128 SPUs as well as 64 Texture Address Units and 24 ROPs.

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 4870 512MB, which has clock speeds of 750 MHz on the GPU, and 900 MHz on the 512 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 800(160x5) SPUs as well as 40 Texture Address Units and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Price Comparison

Please note that the price comparisons are based on search keywords, and might not be the exact same card listed on this page. We have no control over the accuracy of their search results.

GeForce 8800 Ultra Amazon.com Other US-based stores Amazon.co.uk Amazon.de Amazon.fr

Radeon HD 4870 512MB Amazon.com Other US-based stores Amazon.co.uk Amazon.de Amazon.fr

Specifications

Model	GeForce 8800 Ultra	Radeon HD 4870 512MB
Manufacturer	nVidia	ATi
Year	May 2007	Jun 25, 2008
Code Name	G80	RV770 XT
Fab Process	90 nm	55 nm
Bus	PCIe x16	PCIe 2.0 x16
Memory	768 MB	512 MB
Core Speed	612 MHz	750 MHz
Shader Speed	1500 MHz	(N/A) MHz
Memory Speed	1080 MHz	900 MHz
Unified Shaders	128	800(160x5)
Texture Mapping Units	64	40
Render Output Units	24	16
Bus Type	GDDR3	GDDR5
Bus Width	384-bit	256-bit
DirectX Version	DirectX 10	DirectX 10.1
OpenGL Version	OpenGL 3.0	OpenGL 3.0
Power (Max TDP)	171 watts	150 watts
Shader Model	4.0	4.1
Bandwidth	103680 MB/sec	115200 MB/sec
Texel Rate	39168 Mtexels/sec	30000 Mtexels/sec
Pixel Rate	14688 Mpixels/sec	12000 Mpixels/sec

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the maximum amount of information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface within a second. It's worked out by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the 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 number of texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This is calculated by multiplying the total texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the graphics 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 maximum number of pixels the video card could possibly write to the 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 sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.