GeForce 9800 GT 512MB vs GeForce 9800 GX2

Intro

The GeForce 9800 GT 512MB makes use of a 65/55 nm design. nVidia has clocked the core speed at 600 MHz. The GDDR3 memory works at a frequency of 900 MHz on this particular model. It features 112 SPUs along with 56 Texture Address Units and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Compare those specifications to the GeForce 9800 GX2, which has a GPU core clock speed of 600 MHz, and 512 MB of GDDR3 RAM running at 1000 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is made up of 128 Stream Processors, 64 Texture Address Units, and 16 ROPs.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the maximum amount of information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in a second. It is calculated by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the graphics card could possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.