GeForce 8800 GS vs GeForce 9800 GX2

Intro

The GeForce 8800 GS has a core clock speed of 550 MHz and a GDDR3 memory frequency of 800 MHz. It also makes use of a 192-bit bus, and uses a 65 nm design. It features 96 SPUs, 48 TAUs, and 12 ROPs.

Compare those specifications to the GeForce 9800 GX2, which comes with core speeds of 600 MHz on the GPU, and 1000 MHz on the 512 MB of GDDR3 RAM. It features 128 SPUs along with 64 Texture Address Units and 16 ROPs.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the maximum amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR type memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total texture units of the card 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 per second.

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