GeForce 9800 GX2 vs GeForce GTX 550 Ti

Intro

Compare all of that to the GeForce GTX 550 Ti, which has GPU clock speed of 900 MHz, and 1024 MB of GDDR5 RAM set to run at 1026 MHz through a 192-bit bus. It also features 192 SPUs, 32 Texture Address Units, and 24 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 550 Ti		116 Watts
GeForce 9800 GX2		197 Watts
	Difference: 81 Watts (70%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the GeForce 9800 GX2 will be 30% quicker than the GeForce GTX 550 Ti in general, due to its higher bandwidth. (explain)

GeForce 9800 GX2		128000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 550 Ti		98496 MB/sec
	Difference: 29504 (30%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce 9800 GX2 should be quite a bit (approximately 167%) better at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTX 550 Ti. (explain)

GeForce 9800 GX2		76800 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 550 Ti		28800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 48000 (167%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 550 Ti will be a little bit (approximately 13%) faster with regards to full screen anti-aliasing than the GeForce 9800 GX2, and will be capable of handling higher screen resolutions better. (explain)

GeForce GTX 550 Ti		21600 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 9800 GX2		19200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 2400 (13%)

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.

One or more cards in this comparison are multi-core. This means that their bandwidth, texel and pixel rates are theoretically doubled - this does not mean the card will actually perform twice as fast, but only that it should in theory be able to. Actual game benchmarks will give a more accurate idea of what it's capable of.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the max amount of data (in units of MB per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface within a second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the graphics card could possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.