GeForce 8800 GTS (G80) 640MB vs GeForce 9800 GTX

Intro

The GeForce 8800 GTS (G80) 640MB features a GPU core speed of 513 MHz, and the 640 MB of GDDR3 RAM is set to run at 792 MHz through a 320-bit bus. It also features 96 SPUs, 48 Texture Address Units, and 20 ROPs.

Compare all of that to the GeForce 9800 GTX, which has clock speeds of 675 MHz on the GPU, and 1100 MHz on the 512 MB of GDDR3 memory. It features 128 SPUs as well as 64 TAUs and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the largest amount of information (in units of MB per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed in one second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the video 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 maximum number of pixels that the graphics card can possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.