GeForce 8800 Ultra vs Radeon R9 M385X

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon R9 M385X, which comes with GPU core speed of 1100 MHz, and 4096 MB of GDDR5 RAM running at 1500 MHz through a 128-bit bus. It also is comprised of 896 SPUs, 56 Texture Address Units, and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

The GeForce 8800 Ultra, in theory, should perform just a bit faster than the Radeon R9 M385X overall. (explain)

GeForce 8800 Ultra		103680 MB/sec
Radeon R9 M385X		96000 MB/sec
	Difference: 7680 (8%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 M385X will be quite a bit (more or less 57%) faster with regards to AF than the GeForce 8800 Ultra. (explain)

Radeon R9 M385X		61600 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 8800 Ultra		39168 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 22432 (57%)

Pixel Rate

If running with lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon R9 M385X is the winner, but only just. (explain)

Radeon R9 M385X		17600 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 8800 Ultra		14688 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 2912 (20%)

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 transferred past the external memory interface in a second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the graphics card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the graphics card could possibly record to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.