[Olli1324]

What is the deal with these?

As you may recall, I recently posted asking about a suitable graphics card to buy this summer. It turns out my brother is thinking of doing the same. He was checking out some 8800 cards and found one he liked the look of. The 9600 recommended to me has a higher core speed (700MHz Vs 600MHz) and a higher memory speed (1900MHz Vs 1800 MHz). Both cards have 512MB GDDR3. A difference we did see was that his 8800 has 112 stream processors and my 9600 has 64.

How important is the number of stream processors? Is it more important than core speed/memory speed? Would the 8800 be worth the higher cost (about £20 more or something)?

Cheers

[kanoakavirus]

I would personally go with the 8800.

[Olli1324]

In fact, he just found another 8800: 700 core, 1800 mem, 112 stream processors and at the same price as my 9600

512MB Gigabyte 8800 GT: http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/Produ...oductID=747240
512MB BFG 9600 GT: http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/Produ...oductID=771460

So, which is a better buy?

[redden137]

Basically stream processors are the data carriers for your monitor/graphics, so if you have 64 strream processors thats 64 lines of data being transfered, so 112 has 122 lines of data transfering to and fro
obviously if you have more stream processors the quicker the card will be
there are exceptions with ddr 2 and ddr3 ram
and the interface size though most are still 256mb
im sur others will be alond with other solutions

[alex]

There's quite a bit to take into account when spec'ing a graphics card. Firstly; usage (gaming, vid editing or just watching dvd's), the resolution of your monitor and, of course, price because there's a multitude of pre-overclocked cards of each model for sale.

The things you need to be looking at when looking at the architecture of a card:

ROP'S (Render Output Unit) - These output the produced pixels to the screen.
Pixel pipes - These produce pixel's and textures to be sent to the rop's.
Vertex pipes - These add special effects (such as explosions) to objects being produced for the screen.
GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) speed - Bit of an obvious one really, the faster it is the faster it can calculate operations.
Memory controller bit width - You'll see these as quoted as 64bit, 128bit and so on. The wider the better as this basically moves the finished product from the pixel pipes, vertex pipes etc through the ram and onto the screen. The wider a bit width is the more it can move at any given time.
Ram - Depending on how powerful a card is using the headings above dictates how much ram you need. Also, if you want to play a game with AA the ram amount comes into it. This is one of my focuses regarding cards. If you've read some of my previous posts you'll see that 256mb of ram is the absolute max you'll need on a card when gaming at today's standard resolution of 1280x1024 (1440x900 if using a widescreen monitor). At 1680x1050 or 1920x1200 you'll need 512mb. BUT if a card that is low end in the gpu, rop, vertex stakes has 512mb of ram then it makes no sense as the card will not be able to produce enough pixels etc to be able to game at the higher resolutions in the first place, so fitting enough ram to do that makes no sense whatsover except as a selling point as inexperience people will see the higher number and assume its a better card.
Ram speed - When looking at a card you'll see this quoted at an effective speed. This isn't marketing. Because ram on a card is controlled in parallel (say 2 banks of 128mb each) you'll have each bank running at say 700mhz but running together as they do they have an effective speed of 1400mhz or 1.4ghz.

For a DX10 (Windows Vista) card you need to be looking at:

All of the above except for the pixel pipes and Vertex pipes.

Architectural changes to cards now have mean that Stream Shaders on a card of this type do the same job that both pixel pipes and vertex pipes did.

This has one advantage in that wheras before (on a DX9 card) when the gpu is rendering some complex geometry (processed by vertex pipes) the pixel pipes sat idle. This meant that the game frame rates may slow down because there has always been a disparagy between the amount of both pixel and vertex pipes on a particular card, there's usually more pixel pipes. So for any shader intensive rendering your card might be running the game fine and then all of a sudden the frame rates could drop right down.

So, frankly, the more stream shaders you have the better.

And yup, I'd be going for the 8800 too.

[Carbon]

The reason I suggest the 9600 is that the stream processors in benchmarks make absolutely no difference, and the 9600 benches nearly the same as the 8800 across the board.

[Tidusffx]

benchmarks arent as fun as games and thats when stream processors are there :)

[Carbon]

Originally Posted by Tidusffx benchmarks arent as fun as games and thats when stream processors are there :)

Uh, what? I was referring to benchmarked results of game testing.

[Tidusffx]

ah thought you was talking about 3dmark and such lol.

The advantages i see of 9600 are they are cheap and can be quite well overclocked.

But i still think the 8800 got the edge on them.