GeForce 8800 Ultra vs Radeon HD 4850 X2 512MB

Intro

The GeForce 8800 Ultra uses a 90 nm design. nVidia has set the core frequency at 612 MHz. The GDDR3 RAM works at a frequency of 1080 MHz on this particular card. It features 128 SPUs along with 64 TAUs and 24 Rasterization Operator Units.

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 4850 X2 512MB, which comes with a clock speed of 625 MHz and a GDDR3 memory frequency of 993 MHz. It also uses a 256-bit bus, and makes use of a 55 nm design. It is comprised of 800(160x5) SPUs, 40 TAUs, 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 Ultra Amazon.com Other US-based stores Amazon.co.uk Amazon.de Amazon.fr

Radeon HD 4850 X2 512MB Amazon.com Other US-based stores Amazon.co.uk Amazon.de Amazon.fr

Specifications

Model	GeForce 8800 Ultra	Radeon HD 4850 X2 512MB
Manufacturer	nVidia	ATi
Year	May 2007	Nov 7, 2008
Code Name	G80	R700
Fab Process	90 nm	55 nm
Bus	PCIe x16	PCIe 2.0 x16 (PCIe bridge)
Memory	768 MB	512 MB (x2)
Core Speed	612 MHz	625 MHz (x2)
Shader Speed	1500 MHz	(N/A) MHz (x2)
Memory Speed	1080 MHz	993 MHz (x2)
Unified Shaders	128	800(160x5) (x2)
Texture Mapping Units	64	40 (x2)
Render Output Units	24	16 (x2)
Bus Type	GDDR3	GDDR3
Bus Width	384-bit	256-bit (x2)
DirectX Version	DirectX 10	DirectX 10.1
OpenGL Version	OpenGL 3.0	OpenGL 3.0
Power (Max TDP)	171 watts	250 watts
Shader Model	4.0	4.1
Bandwidth	103680 MB/sec	127104 MB/sec
Texel Rate	39168 Mtexels/sec	50000 Mtexels/sec
Pixel Rate	14688 Mpixels/sec	20000 Mpixels/sec

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the max amount of information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in a second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be applied in one 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 this number, the better the video card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card could possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.