GeForce 8800 GTS (G80) 640MB vs Radeon HD 3850 256MB

Intro

The GeForce 8800 GTS (G80) 640MB makes use of a 90 nm design. nVidia has set the core frequency at 513 MHz. The GDDR3 RAM runs at a frequency of 792 MHz on this particular card. It features 96 SPUs along with 48 Texture Address Units and 20 Rasterization Operator Units.

Compare that to the Radeon HD 3850 256MB, which has a GPU core clock speed of 668 MHz, and 256 MB of GDDR3 RAM set to run at 828 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is made up of 320(64x5) Stream Processors, 16 TAUs, 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 GTS (G80) 640MB Amazon.com Other US-based stores Amazon.co.uk Amazon.de Amazon.fr

Radeon HD 3850 256MB Amazon.com Other US-based stores Amazon.co.uk Amazon.de Amazon.fr

Specifications

Model	GeForce 8800 GTS (G80) 640MB	Radeon HD 3850 256MB
Manufacturer	nVidia	ATi
Year	Nov 2006 (640)	Nov 19, 2007
Code Name	G80	RV670 PRO
Fab Process	90 nm	55 nm
Bus	PCIe x16	PCIe 2.0 x16/AGP 8x
Memory	640 MB	256 MB
Core Speed	513 MHz	668 MHz
Shader Speed	1188 MHz	(N/A) MHz
Memory Speed	792 MHz	828 MHz
Unified Shaders	96	320(64x5)
Texture Mapping Units	48	16
Render Output Units	20	16
Bus Type	GDDR3	GDDR3
Bus Width	320-bit	256-bit
DirectX Version	DirectX 10	DirectX 10.1
OpenGL Version	OpenGL 3.0	OpenGL 3.0
Power (Max TDP)	143 watts	75 watts
Shader Model	4.0	4.1
Bandwidth	63360 MB/sec	52992 MB/sec
Texel Rate	24624 Mtexels/sec	10688 Mtexels/sec
Pixel Rate	10260 Mpixels/sec	10688 Mpixels/sec

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

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the graphics card can possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.