GeForce 8800 GS vs GeForce GT 440 3GB

Intro

The GeForce 8800 GS has a GPU clock speed of 550 MHz, and the 384 MB of GDDR3 RAM runs at 800 MHz through a 192-bit bus. It also features 96 SPUs, 48 Texture Address Units, and 12 Raster Operation Units.

Compare those specifications to the GeForce GT 440 3GB, which uses a 40 nm design. nVidia has clocked the core speed at 594 MHz. The GDDR3 RAM is set to run at a frequency of 900 MHz on this model. It features 144 SPUs along with 24 TAUs and 24 ROPs.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the maximum amount of information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface within a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR RAM, 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the graphics 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 the graphics card can possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.