GeForce 8800 GTS (G92) vs GeForce 8800 Ultra

Intro

Compare all of that to the GeForce 8800 Ultra, which comes with clock speeds of 612 MHz on the GPU, and 1080 MHz on the 768 MB of GDDR3 RAM. It features 128 SPUs as well as 64 TAUs and 24 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 8800 GTS (G92)		135 Watts
GeForce 8800 Ultra		171 Watts
	Difference: 36 Watts (27%)

Memory Bandwidth

The GeForce 8800 Ultra should theoretically be quite a bit faster than the GeForce 8800 GTS (G92) in general. (explain)

GeForce 8800 Ultra		103680 MB/sec
GeForce 8800 GTS (G92)		62080 MB/sec
	Difference: 41600 (67%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce 8800 GTS (G92) will be a bit (more or less 6%) better at AF than the GeForce 8800 Ultra. (explain)

GeForce 8800 GTS (G92)		41600 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 8800 Ultra		39168 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 2432 (6%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high screen resolution is important to you, then the GeForce 8800 Ultra is the winner, and very much so. (explain)

GeForce 8800 Ultra		14688 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 8800 GTS (G92)		10400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 4288 (41%)

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

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the max amount of information (in units of MB per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface within a second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card could possibly record to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.