Determining which graphics card to purchase can be an intimidating challenge as you manage the specs of competing cards to make out which is better card and which is better value. Below you get a comparison of two Series 8 nVidia graphics cards, GeForce 8800 GTS 512 MB and GeForce 8800 GT, which will now on referred to as GTS and the GT.

First Impressions

1. GTS and GT are same cards. Both normally have frame buffers that hold 512 MB of GDDR3-type memory with 128 shader processors and 64 texture mapping units. Though, GTS possesses strong core and memory clocks, with GTS's core clock running at 650 MHz compared with GT's 600 MHz, as GTS's memory clock runs at 970 MHz in compare to GT's 900 MHz.

Details

2. Memory bandwidth, which is particularly important for processing big textures, anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering rise from GT's 57.6 GB per second to 62.08 GB per second on GTS. For the moment, FLOPS, or number of floating point operations GPU can handle per second, raises from 168 to 208. The maximum difference can be found in texture fill rate, which rises from 41,600 MTexels per second to 33,600 MTexels per second, means GTS is able of mapping textures quicker.

Performance Tests

3. If you are a gamer, your main worry is performance, which can be summarized in a single statistic: frames per second (FPS). There are many websites that review and compare video cards depending on benchmark tests done for many games on similar systems to get important data and control for unnecessary variables. The results of comparing the performances of GTS and GT are explained below.

Tests using first-person shooter game Prey were run on three resolution settings: 1280 by 1024, 1600 by 1200 and 1920 by 1200. In comparing FPS at every resolution for GTS and GT, there is an apparent trend amongst average frames per second. As GTS always performs better, the gap between FPS counts widens from 5 percent at resolution of 1280 by 1024 to 10 percent at resolution of 1920 by 1200.

Tests for Crysis, the other first-person shooter game that is more precisely demanding, given same results. Crysis was tested on medium detail settings at resolutions of 1280 by 1024 and 1600 by 1200. The GTS performed 3 percent better than GT at lower resolution and 7 percent better on higher resolution. As these differences look small, skipped frames can simply result in your death, particularly during multiplayer games.

Pricing and Availability

4. If you are on a budget, then price is possibly a worry for you. As graphics card prices will differ significantly based on which retailer you go to, you can expect to pay significantly more for a GTS than you would for a GT. A GTS with a frame buffer of at least 512 MB usually costs from $200 to $250, but you can get utilized cards for closer to $150. GTs with equally sized frame buffers is quite simple to get in $100 to $150 range.
Bottom Line

5. Of the GeForce 8800 GTS 512 and GeForce 8800 GT, the GTS is strong card in each way and will give good performance. All things being equivalent, you must choose for GTS always over GT. Though, GTS can be difficult to get and is usually going to be more costly. Thus if money is a major worry for you, GT may be best choice.