GeForce 8800 GTS (G92) vs Radeon HD 3850 X2

Intro

The GeForce 8800 GTS (G92) uses a 65 nm design. nVidia has clocked the core speed at 650 MHz. The GDDR3 memory runs at a speed of 970 MHz on this card. It features 128 SPUs as well as 64 Texture Address Units and 16 ROPs.

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 3850 X2, which uses a 55 nm design. ATi has set the core speed at 668 MHz. The GDDR3 memory is set to run at a speed of 828 MHz on this specific model. It features 320(64x5) SPUs along with 16 TAUs and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

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 (G92) Amazon.com Other US-based stores Amazon.co.uk Amazon.de Amazon.fr

Radeon HD 3850 X2 Amazon.com Other US-based stores Amazon.co.uk Amazon.de Amazon.fr

Specifications

Model	GeForce 8800 GTS (G92)	Radeon HD 3850 X2
Manufacturer	nVidia	ATi
Year	Dec 2007	Apr 4, 2008
Code Name	G92	RV670 PRO
Fab Process	65 nm	55 nm
Bus	PCIe x16 2.0	PCIe 2.0 x16/(internal PCIe 1.1 x16)
Memory	512 MB	512 MB (x2)
Core Speed	650 MHz	668 MHz (x2)
Shader Speed	1625 MHz	(N/A) MHz (x2)
Memory Speed	970 MHz	828 MHz (x2)
Unified Shaders	128	320(64x5) (x2)
Texture Mapping Units	64	16 (x2)
Render Output Units	16	16 (x2)
Bus Type	GDDR3	GDDR3
Bus Width	256-bit	256-bit (x2)
DirectX Version	DirectX 10	DirectX 10.1
OpenGL Version	OpenGL 3.0	OpenGL 3.0
Power (Max TDP)	135 watts	(N/A) watts
Shader Model	4.0	4.1
Bandwidth	62080 MB/sec	105984 MB/sec
Texel Rate	41600 Mtexels/sec	21376 Mtexels/sec
Pixel Rate	10400 Mpixels/sec	21376 Mpixels/sec

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the maximum amount of information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface in one second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the memory bandwidth, the better 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 are processed per second. This is calculated by multiplying the total 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 processed per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the graphics card can possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the core 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 output rate is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.