GeForce 8800 GTS (G92) vs GeForce 9800 GT 1GB

Intro

The GeForce 8800 GTS (G92) makes use of a 65 nm design. nVidia has clocked the core speed at 650 MHz. The GDDR3 memory runs at a frequency of 970 MHz on this specific card. It features 128 SPUs along with 64 TAUs and 16 ROPs.

Compare all that to the GeForce 9800 GT 1GB, which comes with clock speeds of 600 MHz on the GPU, and 900 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR3 memory. It features 112 SPUs along with 56 TAUs and 16 ROPs.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the largest amount of information (counted in MB per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in one second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the memory bandwidth, 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the video card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip can possibly write to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). 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 potential to get to the maximum fill rate.