GeForce GTX 550 Ti vs GeForce GTX 560 Ti

Intro

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

Compare those specs to the GeForce GTX 560 Ti, which comes with a clock frequency of 822 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1002 MHz. It also makes use of a 256-bit bus, and uses a 40 nm design. It features 384 SPUs, 64 Texture Address Units, and 32 ROPs.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the largest amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the better 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 applied per second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the video card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip could possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.