GeForce 8800 GTS (G80) 640MB vs Radeon R9 M270X

Intro

The GeForce 8800 GTS (G80) 640MB uses a 90 nm design. nVidia has clocked the core speed at 513 MHz. The GDDR3 RAM is set to run at a frequency of 792 MHz on this specific model. It features 96 SPUs along with 48 Texture Address Units and 20 Rasterization Operator Units.

Compare those specs to the Radeon R9 M270X, which features GPU core speed of 725 MHz, and 2048 MB of GDDR5 memory running at 1125 MHz through a 128-bit bus. It also is made up of 640 SPUs, 40 Texture Address Units, and 16 ROPs.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the maximum amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface within a second. It is worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one 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 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 maximum number of pixels that the graphics card could possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.