GeForce GT 230 vs GeForce GTX 550 Ti

Intro

Compare all that to the GeForce GTX 550 Ti, which makes use of a 40 nm design. nVidia has clocked the core speed at 900 MHz. The GDDR5 memory works at a speed of 1026 MHz on this particular card. It features 192 SPUs as well as 32 Texture Address Units and 24 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GT 230		65 Watts
GeForce GTX 550 Ti		116 Watts
	Difference: 51 Watts (78%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the GeForce GTX 550 Ti should be a lot faster than the GeForce GT 230 in general. (explain)

GeForce GTX 550 Ti		98496 MB/sec
GeForce GT 230		38400 MB/sec
	Difference: 60096 (157%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 550 Ti will be much (more or less 227%) better at AF than the GeForce GT 230. (explain)

GeForce GTX 550 Ti		28800 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GT 230		8800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 20000 (227%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 550 Ti is a lot (approximately 391%) more effective at AA than the GeForce GT 230, and should be capable of handling higher resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

GeForce GTX 550 Ti		21600 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GT 230		4400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 17200 (391%)

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: Bandwidth is the largest amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in a second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are processed in one second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher this number, 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 number of pixels the graphics card could possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.