The launch of Nvidia's GeForce 8 series graphics cards is one of the more exciting events in PC graphics in years, but those high-end 8800 GTX cards sure are pricey. Fortunately, the GTS is affordable.
Besides costing about $100 less than the high-end GTX model, how does the GeForce 8800 GTS differ? Loyd Case covered that quite well in his GeForce 8800 architectural overview, when discussing how Nvidia's new scalar unified shader architecture is extremely flexible. Simply put, the GTS model is the same chip as the GTX with some of the functional units disabled.
Specifically, Nvidia has disabled two of the stream processor blocks (each block is 16 stream processors, 8 texture filtering units, and 4 texture address units) and one of the raster operation/memory access blocks.
This means that the GTS model has a less-wide memory bus (320-bit vs. 384-bit), fewer shader processors (96 vs. 128), fewer texture address units (24 vs. 32), and fewer raster operators (20 vs. 24).
ExtremeTech
Specifically, Nvidia has disabled two of the stream processor blocks (each block is 16 stream processors, 8 texture filtering units, and 4 texture address units) and one of the raster operation/memory access blocks.
This means that the GTS model has a less-wide memory bus (320-bit vs. 384-bit), fewer shader processors (96 vs. 128), fewer texture address units (24 vs. 32), and fewer raster operators (20 vs. 24).
ExtremeTech
