MSI Radeon X800 XT PE vs NVIDIA GeForce 6800 GT AGP

There are two characteristics that affect the maximum pixel fillrate. These are graphics frequency and the number of ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines). The MSI Radeon X800 XT PE has a modest lead in this area, as it operates at higher rate, and both GPUs have the same number of ROPs. Better maximum pixel fill rate allows more pixels to be drawn on screen per second, which results in increased performance, unless the graphics card is limited by something else, such as texture fillrate, memory bandwidth or CPU speed.

Because two graphics cards have the same number of TMUs (Texture Mapping Units), and the Radeon X800 XT PE graphics card has higher operating frequency, it also has higher texture fillrate. Better texture fill rate allows the GPU 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 graphics unit can read from or write to dedicated memory per second. Graphics cards 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 XT PE comes with higher memory clock. As a consequence, it has higher memory bandwidth.