GeForce GTX 260 Core 216 vs GeForce GTX 550 Ti

Intro

The GeForce GTX 260 Core 216 comes with core speeds of 576 MHz on the GPU, and 999 MHz on the 896 MB of GDDR3 RAM. It features 216 SPUs along with 72 Texture Address Units and 28 ROPs.

Compare all that to the GeForce GTX 550 Ti, which features a clock frequency of 900 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1026 MHz. It also uses a 192-bit bus, and uses a 40 nm design. It features 192 SPUs, 32 Texture Address Units, and 24 Raster Operation Units.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the maximum amount of information (measured in MB per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in one second. It's calculated by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics card can possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel output rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.