GeForce GTX 550 Ti vs GeForce GTX 980

Intro

Compare those specifications to the GeForce GTX 980, which uses a 28 nm design. nVidia has set the core speed at 1126 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM works at a speed of 1750 MHz on this card. It features 2048 SPUs as well as 128 Texture Address Units and 64 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Benchmarks

These are real-world performance benchmarks that were submitted by Hardware Compare users. The scores seen here are the average of all benchmarks submitted for each respective test and hardware.

3DMark Fire Strike Graphics Score

GeForce GTX 980		13552 points
GeForce GTX 550 Ti		1897 points
	Difference: 11655 (614%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 550 Ti		116 Watts
GeForce GTX 980		165 Watts
	Difference: 49 Watts (42%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the GeForce GTX 980 should perform much faster than the GeForce GTX 550 Ti in general. (explain)

GeForce GTX 980		224000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 550 Ti		98496 MB/sec
	Difference: 125504 (127%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 980 is much (about 400%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the GeForce GTX 550 Ti. (explain)

GeForce GTX 980		144128 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 550 Ti		28800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 115328 (400%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 980 will be a lot (about 234%) better at full screen anti-aliasing than the GeForce GTX 550 Ti, and capable of handling higher resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

GeForce GTX 980		72064 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 550 Ti		21600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 50464 (234%)

Please note that the above 'benchmarks' are all just theoretical - the results were calculated based on the card's specifications, and real-world performance may (and probably will) vary at least a bit.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the max amount of data (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface in a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip can possibly record to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.