GeForce 8800 GTX vs GeForce 9800 GTX

Intro

Compare that to the GeForce 9800 GTX, which comes with core clock speeds of 675 MHz on the GPU, and 1100 MHz on the 512 MB of GDDR3 memory. It features 128 SPUs along with 64 Texture Address Units and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 9800 GTX		140 Watts
GeForce 8800 GTX		155 Watts
	Difference: 15 Watts (11%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the GeForce 8800 GTX will be 23% faster than the GeForce 9800 GTX overall, due to its greater bandwidth. (explain)

GeForce 8800 GTX		86400 MB/sec
GeForce 9800 GTX		70400 MB/sec
	Difference: 16000 (23%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce 9800 GTX will be a bit (about 17%) better at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce 8800 GTX. (explain)

GeForce 9800 GTX		43200 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 8800 GTX		36800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 6400 (17%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high resolution is important to you, then the GeForce 8800 GTX is superior to the GeForce 9800 GTX, by far. (explain)

GeForce 8800 GTX		13800 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 9800 GTX		10800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 3000 (28%)

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 max amount of information (in units of MB per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one second. This number 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 video card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card can possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of Render Output Units 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 fill rate is also dependant on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.