GeForce 8500 GT vs GeForce 9800 GX2

Intro

Compare those specs to the GeForce 9800 GX2, which uses a 65 nm design. nVidia has set the core frequency at 600 MHz. The GDDR3 RAM works at a speed of 1000 MHz on this particular card. It features 128 SPUs along with 64 Texture Address Units and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 8500 GT		45 Watts
GeForce 9800 GX2		197 Watts
	Difference: 152 Watts (338%)

Memory Bandwidth

The GeForce 9800 GX2 should in theory be a lot faster than the GeForce 8500 GT overall. (explain)

GeForce 9800 GX2		128000 MB/sec
GeForce 8500 GT		12800 MB/sec
	Difference: 115200 (900%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce 9800 GX2 should be a lot (approximately 2033%) better at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce 8500 GT. (explain)

GeForce 9800 GX2		76800 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 8500 GT		3600 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 73200 (2033%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce 9800 GX2 should be much (about 967%) better at FSAA than the GeForce 8500 GT, and should be able to handle higher screen resolutions better. (explain)

GeForce 9800 GX2		19200 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 8500 GT		1800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 17400 (967%)

Please note that the above 'benchmarks' are all just theoretical - the results were calculated based on the card's specifications, and real-world performance may (and probably will) vary at least a bit.

One or more cards in this comparison are multi-core. This means that their bandwidth, texel and pixel rates are theoretically doubled - this does not mean the card will actually perform twice as fast, but only that it should in theory be able to. Actual game benchmarks will give a more accurate idea of what it's capable of.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the max amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in a second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR type 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 applied per second. This is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the video card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels per second.

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