GeForce 8800 GT 256MB vs GeForce GTX 480

Intro

Compare all of that to the GeForce GTX 480, which has core speeds of 700 MHz on the GPU, and 924 MHz on the 1536 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 480 SPUs along with 60 Texture Address Units and 48 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 8800 GT 256MB		105 Watts
GeForce GTX 480		250 Watts
	Difference: 145 Watts (138%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the GeForce GTX 480 should perform quite a bit faster than the GeForce 8800 GT 256MB overall. (explain)

GeForce GTX 480		177408 MB/sec
GeForce 8800 GT 256MB		44800 MB/sec
	Difference: 132608 (296%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 480 is a lot (about 25%) faster with regards to AF than the GeForce 8800 GT 256MB. (explain)

GeForce GTX 480		42000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 8800 GT 256MB		33600 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 8400 (25%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 480 is much (about 250%) more effective at FSAA than the GeForce 8800 GT 256MB, and also capable of handling higher screen resolutions while still performing well. (explain)

GeForce GTX 480		33600 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 8800 GT 256MB		9600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 24000 (250%)

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

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the largest amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in a second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the bandwidth is, 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 applied per second. This number 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 graphics 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 the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill 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 get to the max fill rate.