Why is my 7900 GTO clocked faster than the 8800 ?

"johns" <johns321.DeleteThis@moscow.com> wrote in message
news:b433261b-f00a-4dd6-9374-a61951542f3a@d21g2000prf.googlegroups.com...
> My 7900 GTO has a core clock of 650 mhz. The typical 8800
> at NewEgg is clocked around 576 mhz. My card right now, as
> old as it is, still sells for over $200. The 8800 GTS is about
> $250 at CompUSA website. That tells me the 8800 will go
> under $200 after Christmas. Is there any reason to buy it
> then ?

Well, I used to have a 9800 Pro that was clocked a lot lower GPU/Memory wise
that a 9600XT. But it' had double the pipelines and a 256bit memory bus,
while the 9600XT was 128bit. It had almost double the performance in games.
It's not about sheer Mhz, but numbers of pipelines, shaders and GPU
architecture as well as memory bus width. An 8800GTX GPU runs at
575Mhz....but there's way more to it than this.
 >> Stay informed about: Why is my 7900 GTO clocked faster than the 8800 ? 

johns wrote:

> My 7900 GTO has a core clock of 650 mhz. The typical 8800
> at NewEgg is clocked around 576 mhz. My card right now, as
> old as it is, still sells for over $200. The 8800 GTS is about
> $250 at CompUSA website. That tells me the 8800 will go
> under $200 after Christmas. Is there any reason to buy it
> then ?

Only you can say if that card meets your needs and your budget.


> Also, I notice that the cards with very large memory ..
> like over 700 megs ... are even slower. Is there an optimum
> memory size on these new cards ?

No, and your premise is false! Cards with more video ram are not, as a
rule, slower than cards with less, all other things similar. There are
natural "powers of 2" points of convention.

> Is that on-card ram
> used for anything other than display ? Are there on-card
> calculations being done, or is it just for higher monitor
> resolutions ?

You can do anything you want with the GPU subsystem if you follow the
SDK, even if it won't be done well. There are many "off label" ideas for
GPUs in use now, google is your friend.

Nearly everything ends up in video ram somehow, all manners of results
of calculations, FSAA, texture filterings, the frame buffer, stencil
shadows, z-buffering, you name it. Surprisingly modest games can eat up
a large amount of video ram.


> And then there is the issue of whether a game is
> cpu ( or dual cpu ) intensive .. or do the newer games
> benefit from the faster cards ? If a game is mostly
> pushing the cpu, and the card is merely driving the
> display, don't we reach a point where card speed
> is meaningless ? For example, my box is an X2
> 4600. If I put an 8800 super card in that box, would
> it improve anything under WinXP ? It almost sounds
> like the big deal is Dx10 in Vista ... and a Dx10
> game card.
>
> johns

This is why we read review sites that benchmark games and answer these
broad topics specifically, since you can't predict game performance
until you actually bench it, no matter who says otherwise, even the
developers can only guess within certain "performance buckets" of how
any given machine class will respond.

Budem zdorovy!
 >> Stay informed about: Why is my 7900 GTO clocked faster than the 8800 ? 

"johns" <johns321 DeleteThis @moscow.com> wrote in message
news:b433261b-f00a-4dd6-9374-a61951542f3a@d21g2000prf.googlegroups.com...
>
> And then there is the issue of whether a game is
> cpu ( or dual cpu ) intensive .. or do the newer games
> benefit from the faster cards ? If a game is mostly
> pushing the cpu, and the card is merely driving the
> display, don't we reach a point where card speed
> is meaningless ? For example, my box is an X2
> 4600. If I put an 8800 super card in that box, would
> it improve anything under WinXP ? It almost sounds
> like the big deal is Dx10 in Vista ... and a Dx10
> game card.
>
> johns

Well I had a ATI x1950 pro card in my machine and yesterday I put a XFX 8800
GT in this machine and the desktop is now much sharper and colours much
nicer on the desktop than it was with the ATI card. As for game performance
this 8800 leaves the ati card in the dust.
 >> Stay informed about: Why is my 7900 GTO clocked faster than the 8800 ?