Compare any two graphics cards:

GeForce 9800 GT 1GB vs GeForce 9800 GT 512MB

Intro

The GeForce 9800 GT 1GB has a clock frequency of 600 MHz and a GDDR3 memory speed of 900 MHz. It also makes use of a 256-bit bus, and uses a 65/55 nm design. It is comprised of 112 SPUs, 56 Texture Address Units, and 16 Raster Operation Units.

Compare that to the GeForce 9800 GT 512MB, which has a GPU core clock speed of 600 MHz, and 512 MB of GDDR3 memory set to run at 900 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also features 112 SPUs, 56 Texture Address Units, and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Both cards have the same power consumption.

Memory Bandwidth

Both cards have the exact same memory bandwidth, so theoretically they should have the same performance. (explain)

Texel Rate

Both cards have the exact same texel rate, so theoretically they should perform equally good at at anisotropic filtering. (explain)

Pixel Rate

Both cards have exactly the same pixel rate, so in theory they should perform equally good at at AA, and be able to handle the same resolutions. (explain)

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

Display Prices

Hide Prices

GeForce 9800 GT 1GB

Amazon.com

Check prices at:

GeForce 9800 GT 512MB

Amazon.com

Check prices at:

Please note that the price comparisons are based on search keywords - sometimes it might show cards with very similar names that are not exactly the same as the one chosen in the comparison. We do try to filter out the wrong results as best we can, though.

Specifications

Display Specifications

Hide Specifications

Model	GeForce 9800 GT 1GB	GeForce 9800 GT 512MB
Manufacturer	nVidia	nVidia
Year	July 2008	July 2008
Code Name	G92a/b	G92a/b
Memory	1024 MB	512 MB
Core Speed	600 MHz	600 MHz
Memory Speed	1800 MHz	1800 MHz
Power (Max TDP)	105 watts	105 watts
Bandwidth	57600 MB/sec	57600 MB/sec
Texel Rate	33600 Mtexels/sec	33600 Mtexels/sec
Pixel Rate	9600 Mpixels/sec	9600 Mpixels/sec
Unified Shaders	112	112
Texture Mapping Units	56	56
Render Output Units	16	16
Bus Type	GDDR3	GDDR3
Bus Width	256-bit	256-bit
Fab Process	65/55 nm	65/55 nm
Transistors	754 million	754 million
Bus	PCIe x16 2.0	PCIe x16 2.0
DirectX Version	DirectX 10	DirectX 10
OpenGL Version	OpenGL 3.0	OpenGL 3.0

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the largest amount of information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in one second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card can possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel fill rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.

Display Prices

Hide Prices