GeForce 8800 GTS (G80) 320MB vs GeForce 8800 GTS (G92)

Intro

The GeForce 8800 GTS (G80) 320MB makes use of a 90 nm design. nVidia has clocked the core frequency at 513 MHz. The GDDR3 memory is set to run at a frequency of 792 MHz on this card. It features 96 SPUs as well as 48 Texture Address Units and 20 Rasterization Operator Units.

Compare all that to the GeForce 8800 GTS (G92), which has core clock speeds of 650 MHz on the GPU, and 970 MHz on the 512 MB of GDDR3 RAM. It features 128 SPUs along with 64 TAUs and 16 ROPs.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the largest amount of data (in units of MB per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface within a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be applied in one second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total texture units by the core speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the 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 maximum amount of pixels the video card can possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.