GeForce 8300 GS (OEM) vs GeForce GTX 460 SE

Intro

The GeForce 8300 GS (OEM) makes use of a 80 nm design. nVidia has clocked the core speed at 450 MHz. The DDR2 RAM is set to run at a frequency of 400 MHz on this particular card. It features 8 SPUs along with 4 Texture Address Units and 2 Rasterization Operator Units.

Compare those specifications to the GeForce GTX 460 SE, which has a clock speed of 650 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 850 MHz. It also features a 256-bit memory bus, and makes use of a 40 nm design. It is made up of 288 SPUs, 48 TAUs, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the largest amount of data (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in one second. It's calculated by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses 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, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This is calculated by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the graphics card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics card can possibly write to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called 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, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.