GeForce GTX 550 Ti vs GeForce GTX 560

Intro

The GeForce GTX 550 Ti has a core clock speed of 900 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1026 MHz. It also uses a 192-bit memory bus, and uses a 40 nm design. It features 192 SPUs, 32 Texture Address Units, and 24 Raster Operation Units.

Compare all of that to the GeForce GTX 560, which features a core clock frequency of 810 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1001 MHz. It also uses a 256-bit memory bus, and uses a 40 nm design. It is made up of 336 SPUs, 56 Texture Address Units, and 32 ROPs.

Price Comparison

GeForce GTX 550 Ti Amazon.com

GeForce GTX 560 Amazon.com

Please note that the price comparisons are based on search keywords - sometimes it might show cards with very similar names that are not exactly the same as the one chosen in the comparison. We do try to filter out the wrong results as best we can, though.

Specifications

Model	GeForce GTX 550 Ti	GeForce GTX 560
Manufacturer	nVidia	nVidia
Year	March 2011	May 2011
Code Name	GF116	GF114
Fab Process	40 nm	40 nm
Bus	PCIe 2.1 x16	PCIe 2.0 x16
Memory	1024 MB	1024 MB
Core Speed	900 MHz	810 MHz
Shader Speed	1800 MHz	1600 MHz
Memory Speed	1026 MHz (4104 MHz effective)	1001 MHz (4004 MHz effective)
Unified Shaders	192	336
Texture Mapping Units	32	56
Render Output Units	24	32
Bus Type	GDDR5	GDDR5
Bus Width	192-bit	256-bit
DirectX Version	DirectX 11	DirectX 11
OpenGL Version	OpenGL 4.1	OpenGL 4.1
Power (Max TDP)	116 watts	150 watts
Shader Model	5.0	5.0
Bandwidth	98496 MB/sec	128128 MB/sec
Texel Rate	28800 Mtexels/sec	45360 Mtexels/sec
Pixel Rate	21600 Mpixels/sec	25920 Mpixels/sec

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the maximum amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface within a second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the graphics card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics chip can possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.