GeForce 8800 GT 512MB vs Radeon HD 7770

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 7770, which makes use of a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 1000 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM runs at a frequency of 1125 MHz on this model. It features 640 SPUs along with 40 TAUs and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 7770		80 Watts
GeForce 8800 GT 512MB		105 Watts
	Difference: 25 Watts (31%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 7770 is 25% quicker than the GeForce 8800 GT 512MB in general, because of its greater bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon HD 7770		72000 MB/sec
GeForce 8800 GT 512MB		57600 MB/sec
	Difference: 14400 (25%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7770 will be just a bit (more or less 19%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the GeForce 8800 GT 512MB. (explain)

Radeon HD 7770		40000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 8800 GT 512MB		33600 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 6400 (19%)

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 7770 is the winner, by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 7770		16000 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 8800 GT 512MB		9600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 6400 (67%)

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: Memory bandwidth is the largest amount of information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the 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 maximum number of pixels the graphics card could possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.