GeForce GTX 550 Ti vs GeForce GTX 560 Ti

Intro

The GeForce GTX 550 Ti uses a 40 nm design. nVidia has set the core speed at 900 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM is set to run at a speed of 1026 MHz on this particular card. It features 192 SPUs as well as 32 TAUs and 24 Rasterization Operator Units.

Compare all of that to the GeForce GTX 560 Ti, which comes with a clock speed of 822 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1002 MHz. It also uses a 256-bit bus, and makes use of a 40 nm design. It features 384 SPUs, 64 TAUs, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Price Comparison

GeForce GTX 550 Ti Amazon.com

GeForce GTX 560 Ti 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 Ti
Manufacturer	nVidia	nVidia
Year	March 2011	January 2011
Code Name	GF116	GF114
Fab Process	40 nm	40 nm
Bus	PCIe 2.1 x16	PCIe x16
Memory	1024 MB	1024 MB
Core Speed	900 MHz	822 MHz
Shader Speed	1800 MHz	1645 MHz
Memory Speed	1026 MHz (4104 MHz effective)	1002 MHz (4008 MHz effective)
Unified Shaders	192	384
Texture Mapping Units	32	64
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	170 watts
Shader Model	5.0	5.0
Bandwidth	98496 MB/sec	128256 MB/sec
Texel Rate	28800 Mtexels/sec	52608 Mtexels/sec
Pixel Rate	21600 Mpixels/sec	26304 Mpixels/sec

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the max amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, 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 number of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This is worked out 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 graphics card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the video card can possibly record 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 clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as 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 bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.