GeForce 9800 GTX vs GeForce GTX 550 Ti

Intro

Compare those specifications to the GeForce GTX 550 Ti, which uses a 40 nm design. nVidia has set the core speed at 900 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM works at a frequency of 1026 MHz on this specific card. It features 192 SPUs along with 32 Texture Address Units and 24 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 550 Ti		116 Watts
GeForce 9800 GTX		140 Watts
	Difference: 24 Watts (21%)

Memory Bandwidth

The GeForce GTX 550 Ti should theoretically be much faster than the GeForce 9800 GTX overall. (explain)

GeForce GTX 550 Ti		98496 MB/sec
GeForce 9800 GTX		70400 MB/sec
	Difference: 28096 (40%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce 9800 GTX is a lot (about 50%) more effective at AF than the GeForce GTX 550 Ti. (explain)

GeForce 9800 GTX		43200 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 550 Ti		28800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 14400 (50%)

Pixel Rate

If running with lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 550 Ti is superior to the GeForce 9800 GTX, by far. (explain)

GeForce GTX 550 Ti		21600 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 9800 GTX		10800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 10800 (100%)

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 maximum amount of data (in units of MB per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in a second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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