The GeForce 8800GT  S has fully decoupled texturing units from the stream processors. The 8800GTS can deliver up to 40 pixels per clock of raw texture filtering horsepower, (versus the 24 on the GeForce 7900 GTX), 20 Pixels per clock of texture addressing, 20 pixels per clock of 2x anisotropic filtering, and 20 bilinear filtered pixels per clock. What this means is that bilinear anisotropic filtering is almost free on the GeForce 8 (nothing is free in 3D). FP16 bilinear filtering output is 20 pixels per clock, and FP16 2:1 AF is done at 10 pixels per clock.

The texture units are clocked at 500 MHz on the GTS. With 20 pixels per clock of bilinear filtered texels that gives a texel fill rate of 10 Gigatexels a second which is the standard way to derive texel fill rate. However, when 2:1 bilinear anisotropic filtering is applied, two bilinear texels are used, giving the card an effective 20 gigatexel fill rate. Ugh, NVIDIA’s math isn’t important to me, as I like to deal with real numbers.

The GeForce 8800GTS can output 20 pixels (ROPs) in a single clock with color and Z-processing. The 20 ROPs are divided into 5 partitions of 4 (16 subpixels samples). There is a new mode called Z-only processing that allows 160 samples per clock. If 4X MSAA is applied then 40 Pixels Z-only processing is possible. Again, ugh, in terms of pure pixel fillrate, the 8800GTS can output 20x500 MHz=10 Gigapixels a second theoretical, more than enough to fill a 2560x1600 screen many times.

The memory architecture on the 8800GTS is split into 5 partitions of 64-bit memory. This matches well with the 20 outputted pixels per clock. Graphics cards have been stuck on the 256-bit memory bus since the RADEON 9700 Pro and the GeForce 5900 series. The 8800GTS is the first card on the commercial market to sport a 320-bit memory bus. EVGA clocked the memory on their 8800GTS at 800MHz; 1.6GHz effective, the same as the reference clock this provides the EVGA card with up to 51.2GB of memory bandwidth.