GeForce 9500 GT DDR2 vs GeForce 9800 GT 1GB

Intro

The GeForce 9500 GT DDR2 has a clock frequency of 550 MHz and a DDR2 memory speed of 500 MHz. It also makes use of a 128-bit memory bus, and uses a 65 nm design. It is made up of 32 SPUs, 16 TAUs, and 8 ROPs.

Compare all that to the GeForce 9800 GT 1GB, which features core clock speeds of 600 MHz on the GPU, and 900 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR3 memory. It features 112 SPUs as well as 56 Texture Address Units and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the max amount of data (in units of MB per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface in one second. The number is calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the graphics card could possibly write to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate also depends 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.