GeForce 8800 Ultra vs Radeon R9 M385X

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon R9 M385X, which makes use of a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 1100 MHz. The GDDR5 memory runs at a frequency of 1500 MHz on this specific model. It features 896 SPUs along with 56 Texture Address Units and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the GeForce 8800 Ultra will be 8% quicker than the Radeon R9 M385X in general, due to its higher bandwidth. (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%) more effective at texture filtering 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 a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon R9 M385X is superior to the GeForce 8800 Ultra, though only just barely. (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 data (in units of MB per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface in one second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be processed in one second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the card will be at handling 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 can possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.