EVGA GeForce 6800 vs NVIDIA GeForce 7800 GS

Having many more Raster Operations Pipelines (ROPs) helps the EVGA GeForce 6800 card to deliver higher pixel fill rate, even though its graphics clock is slower. Having better pixel fillrate allows the graphics card to draw more pixels on screen and off screen, which is beneficial for some 3D effects in games, or when playing at higher display resolutions.

The GeForce 7800 GS has more TMUs (Texture Mapping Units) than the EVGA GeForce 6800. Furthermore, its graphics clock rate is higher, therefore it is not surprising to see that it has significantly higher texture fillrate. Better texture fill rate allows the GPU to utilize more complex 3D effects and/or apply more textures to each textured picture element, which improves games visual appearance.

To speed up processing, the graphics cards store 3D scene data, textures and intermediate data, used for image generation, in on-board memory. The video memory usually has much higher bandwidth than system RAM, and more bandwidth allows the graphics card to run at higher screen resolutions, use larger and more detailed textures, and apply more complex 3D effects and filters. Memory type, speed, and width of memory interface all affect the bandwidth value. Specifically, the NVIDIA GeForce 7800 GS offers better and higher clocked memory. As a consequence, it has substantially higher memory bandwidth.