GeForce 8800 GTS (G80) 320MB vs GeForce GT 340

Intro

The GeForce 8800 GTS (G80) 320MB makes use of a 90 nm design. nVidia has clocked the core speed at 513 MHz. The GDDR3 memory is set to run at a speed of 792 MHz on this card. It features 96 SPUs along with 48 Texture Address Units and 20 Rasterization Operator Units.

Compare all that to the GeForce GT 340, which has a GPU core clock speed of 550 MHz, and 512 MB of GDDR5 memory running at 850 MHz through a 128-bit bus. It also is made up of 96 SPUs, 32 TAUs, and 8 ROPs.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the maximum amount of information (measured in MB per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface within a second. It's calculated by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed in one second. This is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the video card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the graphics card could possibly write to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.