GeForce 8800 Ultra vs Radeon HD 4870 1GB

Intro

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

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 4870 1GB, which features a clock speed of 750 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 900 MHz. It also features a 256-bit memory bus, and makes use of a 55 nm design. It is comprised of 800(160x5) SPUs, 40 Texture Address Units, and 16 ROPs.

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 1GB Amazon.com Other US-based stores Amazon.co.uk Amazon.de Amazon.fr

Specifications

Model	GeForce 8800 Ultra	Radeon HD 4870 1GB
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	1024 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: Memory bandwidth is the maximum amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface within a second. It's calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the graphics card could possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.