GeForce GT 440 3GB vs GeForce GTS 450 1GB

Intro

The GeForce GT 440 3GB makes use of a 40 nm design. nVidia has clocked the core frequency at 594 MHz. The GDDR3 memory is set to run at a speed of 900 MHz on this particular card. It features 144 SPUs along with 24 Texture Address Units and 24 Rasterization Operator Units.

Compare all that to the GeForce GTS 450 1GB, which has core speeds of 783 MHz on the GPU, and 902 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 192 SPUs along with 32 TAUs and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the max amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface within a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR memory, it 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 anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the video card could possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.