GeForce 8800 GTS (G80) 320MB vs Radeon HD 4730

Intro

The GeForce 8800 GTS (G80) 320MB comes with a core clock frequency of 513 MHz and a GDDR3 memory frequency of 792 MHz. It also makes use of a 320-bit memory bus, and makes use of a 90 nm design. It features 96 SPUs, 48 Texture Address Units, and 20 Raster Operation Units.

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 4730, which features GPU core speed of 700 MHz, and 512 MB of GDDR5 memory running at 900 MHz through a 128-bit bus. It also is made up of 640(128x5) SPUs, 32 Texture Address Units, and 8 Raster Operation Units.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the max amount of data (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR RAM, it should 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 AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total texture units 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 amount of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly write 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 speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate also depends on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.