GeForce GTX 550 Ti vs GeForce GTX 560 Ti

Intro

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

Compare all that to the GeForce GTX 560 Ti, which comes with GPU core speed of 822 MHz, and 1024 MB of GDDR5 RAM set to run at 1002 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is comprised of 384 Stream Processors, 64 Texture Address Units, and 32 ROPs.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the largest amount of information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface within a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.