GeForce 8800 GTS (G80) 640MB vs Radeon HD 4730

Intro

The GeForce 8800 GTS (G80) 640MB makes use of a 90 nm design. nVidia has set the core speed at 513 MHz. The GDDR3 memory is set to run at a frequency of 792 MHz on this specific model. It features 96 SPUs along with 48 Texture Address Units and 20 ROPs.

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 4730, which comes with core clock speeds of 700 MHz on the GPU, and 900 MHz on the 512 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 640(128x5) SPUs as well as 32 TAUs and 8 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 GTS (G80) 640MB Amazon.com Other US-based stores Amazon.co.uk Amazon.de Amazon.fr

Radeon HD 4730 Amazon.com Other US-based stores Amazon.co.uk Amazon.de Amazon.fr

Specifications

Model	GeForce 8800 GTS (G80) 640MB	Radeon HD 4730
Manufacturer	nVidia	ATi
Year	Nov 2006 (640)	Jun 8, 2009
Code Name	G80	RV770/CE
Fab Process	90 nm	55 nm
Bus	PCIe x16	PCIe 2.0 x16
Memory	640 MB	512 MB
Core Speed	513 MHz	700 MHz
Shader Speed	1188 MHz	(N/A) MHz
Memory Speed	792 MHz	900 MHz
Unified Shaders	96	640(128x5)
Texture Mapping Units	48	32
Render Output Units	20	8
Bus Type	GDDR3	GDDR5
Bus Width	320-bit	128-bit
DirectX Version	DirectX 10	DirectX 10.1
OpenGL Version	OpenGL 3.0	OpenGL 3.0
Power (Max TDP)	143 watts	140 watts
Shader Model	4.0	4.1
Bandwidth	63360 MB/sec	57600 MB/sec
Texel Rate	24624 Mtexels/sec	22400 Mtexels/sec
Pixel Rate	10260 Mpixels/sec	5600 Mpixels/sec

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the largest amount of information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface within a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the core 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 of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.