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GeForce 8800 GS vs Radeon HD 6970

Intro

The GeForce 8800 GS uses a 65 nm design. nVidia has set the core speed at 550 MHz. The GDDR3 RAM runs at a frequency of 800 MHz on this particular card. It features 96 SPUs as well as 48 Texture Address Units and 12 ROPs.

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 6970, which uses a 40 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 880 MHz. The GDDR5 memory runs at a frequency of 1375 MHz on this particular model. It features 1536 SPUs as well as 96 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 8800 GS 105 Watts
Radeon HD 6970 250 Watts
Difference: 145 Watts (138%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 6970 should be 358% faster than the GeForce 8800 GS overall, because of its greater data rate. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970 176000 MB/sec
GeForce 8800 GS 38400 MB/sec
Difference: 137600 (358%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6970 should be quite a bit (approximately 220%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce 8800 GS. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970 84480 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 8800 GS 26400 Mtexels/sec
Difference: 58080 (220%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 6970 will be a lot (more or less 327%) more effective at FSAA than the GeForce 8800 GS, and will be capable of handling higher screen resolutions while still performing well. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970 28160 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 8800 GS 6600 Mpixels/sec
Difference: 21560 (327%)

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.

Price Comparison

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GeForce 8800 GS

Amazon.com

Check prices at:

Radeon HD 6970

Amazon.com

Check prices at:

Please note that the price comparisons are based on search keywords - sometimes it might show cards with very similar names that are not exactly the same as the one chosen in the comparison. We do try to filter out the wrong results as best we can, though.

Specifications

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Model GeForce 8800 GS Radeon HD 6970
Manufacturer nVidia AMD
Year Jan 2008 December 2010
Code Name G92 Cayman XT
Memory 384 MB 2048 MB
Core Speed 550 MHz 880 MHz
Memory Speed 1600 MHz 5500 MHz
Power (Max TDP) 105 watts 250 watts
Bandwidth 38400 MB/sec 176000 MB/sec
Texel Rate 26400 Mtexels/sec 84480 Mtexels/sec
Pixel Rate 6600 Mpixels/sec 28160 Mpixels/sec
Unified Shaders 96 1536
Texture Mapping Units 48 96
Render Output Units 12 32
Bus Type GDDR3 GDDR5
Bus Width 192-bit 256-bit
Fab Process 65 nm 40 nm
Transistors 754 million 2640 million
Bus PCIe x16 2.0 PCIe x16
DirectX Version DirectX 10 DirectX 11
OpenGL Version OpenGL 3.0 OpenGL 4.1

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the maximum amount of information (in units of MB per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in a second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. 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 number of texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card can possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.

Display Prices

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GeForce 8800 GS

Amazon.com

Check prices at:

Radeon HD 6970

Amazon.com

Check prices at:

Please note that the price comparisons are based on search keywords - sometimes it might show cards with very similar names that are not exactly the same as the one chosen in the comparison. We do try to filter out the wrong results as best we can, though.

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