EVGA GeForce 7950 GT KO vs NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GT

The maximum theoretical pixel fillrate is proportional to the number of ROPs and graphics clock speed. The GeForce 9800 GT has an edge here, as it operates at higher frequency, and both GPUs have identical number of Raster Operations Pipelines. Better maximum pixel fill rate allows more pixels to be drawn on screen per second, which results in increased performance, unless there are bottlenecks somewhere else.

The NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GT has many more TMUs than the EVGA GeForce 7950 GT KO graphics card. What's more, its graphics clock speed is higher, therefore it is not surprising to see that it has significantly higher texture fillrate. Better texture fill rate allows the GPU to map more textures and/or use more complex 3D effects for each texel, which improves visual appearance of games and generated images.

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 card to run at higher display resolutions, use larger and more detailed textures, and apply more complex 3D effects and filters. The bandwidth is dependent on a few components, like memory type, speed, and width of memory interface. Specifically, higher memory bandwidth of the GeForce 9800 GT graphics card is due to higher clocked memory.