GeForce 8800 GTX vs GeForce GT 240 GDDR5 1GB

Intro

The GeForce 8800 GTX makes use of a 90 nm design. nVidia has clocked the core frequency at 575 MHz. The GDDR3 memory works at a frequency of 900 MHz on this particular model. It features 128 SPUs along with 64 Texture Address Units and 24 Rasterization Operator Units.

Compare those specs to the GeForce GT 240 GDDR5 1GB, which comes with core clock speeds of 550 MHz on the GPU, and 850 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 96 SPUs as well as 32 TAUs and 8 ROPs.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the maximum amount of data (in units of MB per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in one second. The number is calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the 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 number of texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the video card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics card can possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.