GeForce 8800 Ultra vs GeForce GTX 870M

Intro

Compare all that to the GeForce GTX 870M, which comes with core speeds of 941 MHz on the GPU, and 1000 MHz on the 3072 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 1344 SPUs as well as 112 Texture Address Units and 24 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 870M		110 Watts
GeForce 8800 Ultra		171 Watts
	Difference: 61 Watts (55%)

Memory Bandwidth

The GeForce 8800 Ultra should in theory be just a bit faster than the GeForce GTX 870M overall. (explain)

GeForce 8800 Ultra		103680 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 870M		96000 MB/sec
	Difference: 7680 (8%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 870M will be quite a bit (more or less 169%) better at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce 8800 Ultra. (explain)

GeForce GTX 870M		105392 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 8800 Ultra		39168 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 66224 (169%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high screen resolution is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 870M is a better choice, and very much so. (explain)

GeForce GTX 870M		22584 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 8800 Ultra		14688 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 7896 (54%)

Please note that the above 'benchmarks' are all just theoretical - the results were calculated based on the card's specifications, and real-world performance may (and probably will) vary at least a bit.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the max amount of data (measured in MB per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface in one second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen 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 by the core speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the graphics card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the graphics card could possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.