GeForce 8800 GTS (G80) 640MB vs GeForce 9600 GT 1GB

Intro

The GeForce 8800 GTS (G80) 640MB features core speeds of 513 MHz on the GPU, and 792 MHz on the 640 MB of GDDR3 memory. It features 96 SPUs as well as 48 Texture Address Units and 20 Rasterization Operator Units.

Compare all of that to the GeForce 9600 GT 1GB, which uses a 65/55 nm design. nVidia has set the core speed at 650 MHz. The GDDR3 RAM is set to run at a speed of 900 MHz on this specific card. It features 64 SPUs along with 32 Texture Address Units and 16 ROPs.

Price Comparison

Please note that the price comparisons are based on search keywords, and might not be the exact same card listed on this page. We have no control over the accuracy of their search results.

GeForce 8800 GTS (G80) 640MB Amazon.com Other US-based stores Amazon.co.uk Amazon.de Amazon.fr

GeForce 9600 GT 1GB Amazon.com Other US-based stores Amazon.co.uk Amazon.de Amazon.fr

Specifications

Model	GeForce 8800 GTS (G80) 640MB	GeForce 9600 GT 1GB
Manufacturer	nVidia	nVidia
Year	Nov 2006 (640)	Feb 2008
Code Name	G80	G94a/b
Fab Process	90 nm	65/55 nm
Bus	PCIe x16	PCIe x16 2.0
Memory	640 MB	1024 MB
Core Speed	513 MHz	650 MHz
Shader Speed	1188 MHz	1625 MHz
Memory Speed	792 MHz	900 MHz
Unified Shaders	96	64
Texture Mapping Units	48	32
Render Output Units	20	16
Bus Type	GDDR3	GDDR3
Bus Width	320-bit	256-bit
DirectX Version	DirectX 10	DirectX 10
OpenGL Version	OpenGL 3.0	OpenGL 3.0
Power (Max TDP)	143 watts	95 watts
Shader Model	4.0	4.0
Bandwidth	63360 MB/sec	57600 MB/sec
Texel Rate	24624 Mtexels/sec	20800 Mtexels/sec
Pixel Rate	10260 Mpixels/sec	10400 Mpixels/sec

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the largest amount of information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface within a second. It's worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the memory bandwidth, 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the card will be at handling 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 chip could possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.