GeForce 8300 GS (OEM) vs GeForce 9800 GX2

Intro

Compare that to the GeForce 9800 GX2, which uses a 65 nm design. nVidia has clocked the core speed at 600 MHz. The GDDR3 memory runs at a frequency of 1000 MHz on this specific model. 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 8300 GS (OEM)		40 Watts
GeForce 9800 GX2		197 Watts
	Difference: 157 Watts (393%)

Memory Bandwidth

The GeForce 9800 GX2 should theoretically perform much faster than the GeForce 8300 GS (OEM) overall. (explain)

GeForce 9800 GX2		128000 MB/sec
GeForce 8300 GS (OEM)		6400 MB/sec
	Difference: 121600 (1900%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce 9800 GX2 should be a lot (approximately 4167%) better at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce 8300 GS (OEM). (explain)

GeForce 9800 GX2		76800 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 8300 GS (OEM)		1800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 75000 (4167%)

Pixel Rate

If running with lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the GeForce 9800 GX2 is the winner, by a large margin. (explain)

GeForce 9800 GX2		19200 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 8300 GS (OEM)		900 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 18300 (2033%)

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 MB per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in one second. The number is calculated by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total texture units 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 in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card can possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.