GeForce 8800 Ultra vs Radeon R9 M385X

Intro

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

Compare those specifications to the Radeon R9 M385X, which comes with clock speeds of 1100 MHz on the GPU, and 1500 MHz on the 4096 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 896 SPUs along with 56 Texture Address Units and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the max amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in one second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the graphics 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 most pixels the graphics card could possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.