GeForce GTX 550 Ti vs GeForce GTX 980 Ti

Intro

Compare those specs to the GeForce GTX 980 Ti, which uses a 28 nm design. nVidia has set the core speed at 1000 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM runs at a speed of 1750 MHz on this particular card. It features 2816 SPUs as well as 176 Texture Address Units and 96 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 Ti		17120 points
GeForce GTX 550 Ti		1897 points
	Difference: 15223 (802%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 550 Ti		116 Watts
GeForce GTX 980 Ti		250 Watts
	Difference: 134 Watts (116%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the GeForce GTX 980 Ti should in theory be a lot superior to the GeForce GTX 550 Ti in general. (explain)

GeForce GTX 980 Ti		336000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 550 Ti		98496 MB/sec
	Difference: 237504 (241%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 980 Ti should be quite a bit (about 511%) faster with regards to AF than the GeForce GTX 550 Ti. (explain)

GeForce GTX 980 Ti		176000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 550 Ti		28800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 147200 (511%)

Pixel Rate

If running with lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 980 Ti is a better choice, by a large margin. (explain)

GeForce GTX 980 Ti		96000 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 550 Ti		21600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 74400 (344%)

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: Memory bandwidth is the largest amount of information (counted in MB per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen 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 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 amount of pixels the video card can possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated 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 drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.