GIGABYTE Radeon X800 vs NVIDIA GeForce 6800

The Radeon X800 has more ROPs than the NVIDIA GeForce 6800. On top of that, its graphics clock is higher, therefore it has substantially higher pixel fillrate. Better maximum pixel fill rate means that the graphics card can draw more pixels on and off screen each second, increasing overall performance, unless the GPU is limited by something else, such as texture mapping or memory bandwidth.

Graphics unit performance in present-day games is less dependent on pixel fillrate, and more on texture fill rate. This parameter is proportional to the number of TMUs and graphics clock. The Radeon X800 has a modest advantage here, as it runs at higher frequency, and both graphics cards have the same number of Texture Mapping Units. Having better texture fill rate allows the graphics card to utilize more sophisticated 3D effects and/or apply more textures to each textured picture element, which improves games visual appearance.

Memory bandwidth parameter tells how much memory (in Gigabytes) the GPU can read from or write to dedicated memory per second. GPUs with higher memory bandwidth have better performance at high display resolutions, or when using large and detailed textures, and/or utilizing complex 3D effects and filters, like anti-aliasing. Memory type, speed, and memory interface width all affect the bandwidth value. Specifically, the Radeon X800 comes with higher memory clock. As such, it has higher memory bandwidth.