GeForce 8800 GTS (G80) 640MB vs Radeon HD 3870 X2 512MB

Intro

The GeForce 8800 GTS (G80) 640MB uses a 90 nm design. nVidia has clocked the core frequency at 513 MHz. The GDDR3 RAM is set to run at a speed of 792 MHz on this particular card. It features 96 SPUs along with 48 Texture Address Units and 20 Rasterization Operator Units.

Compare that to the Radeon HD 3870 X2 512MB, which has clock speeds of 825 MHz on the GPU, and 900 MHz on the 512 MB of GDDR3 RAM. It features 320(64x5) SPUs as well as 16 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

Radeon HD 3870 X2 512MB Amazon.com Other US-based stores Amazon.co.uk Amazon.de Amazon.fr

Specifications

Model	GeForce 8800 GTS (G80) 640MB	Radeon HD 3870 X2 512MB
Manufacturer	nVidia	ATi
Year	Nov 2006 (640)	Jan 28, 2008
Code Name	G80	R680
Fab Process	90 nm	55 nm
Bus	PCIe x16	PCIe 2.0 x16/(internal PCIe 1.1 x16)
Memory	640 MB	512 MB (x2)
Core Speed	513 MHz	825 MHz (x2)
Shader Speed	1188 MHz	(N/A) MHz (x2)
Memory Speed	792 MHz	900 MHz (x2)
Unified Shaders	96	320(64x5) (x2)
Texture Mapping Units	48	16 (x2)
Render Output Units	20	16 (x2)
Bus Type	GDDR3	GDDR3
Bus Width	320-bit	256-bit (x2)
DirectX Version	DirectX 10	DirectX 10.1
OpenGL Version	OpenGL 3.0	OpenGL 3.0
Power (Max TDP)	143 watts	(N/A) watts
Shader Model	4.0	4.1
Bandwidth	63360 MB/sec	115200 MB/sec
Texel Rate	24624 Mtexels/sec	26400 Mtexels/sec
Pixel Rate	10260 Mpixels/sec	26400 Mpixels/sec

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the maximum amount of data (in units of MB per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in a second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR type memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics card could possibly write to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.