GeForce 8800 GTS (G80) 320MB vs GeForce GTX 560

Intro

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

Compare those specifications to the GeForce GTX 560, which has a core clock frequency of 810 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1001 MHz. It also uses a 256-bit memory bus, and uses a 40 nm design. It is made up of 336 SPUs, 56 Texture Address Units, and 32 ROPs.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the maximum amount of information (in units of MB per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface in one second. It is worked out by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, the better 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 number is calculated by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the video card could possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel output rate also depends on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.