GeForce 9600 GSO 1.5GB vs GeForce GTX 550 Ti

Intro

Compare all of that to the GeForce GTX 550 Ti, which uses a 40 nm design. nVidia has clocked the core speed at 900 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM works at a frequency of 1026 MHz on this 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 9600 GSO 1.5GB		84 Watts
GeForce GTX 550 Ti		116 Watts
	Difference: 32 Watts (38%)

Memory Bandwidth

The GeForce GTX 550 Ti should theoretically perform much faster than the GeForce 9600 GSO 1.5GB overall. (explain)

GeForce GTX 550 Ti		98496 MB/sec
GeForce 9600 GSO 1.5GB		38400 MB/sec
	Difference: 60096 (157%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 550 Ti should be a small bit (about 9%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce 9600 GSO 1.5GB. (explain)

GeForce GTX 550 Ti		28800 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 9600 GSO 1.5GB		26400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 2400 (9%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high resolution is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 550 Ti is a better choice, and very much so. (explain)

GeForce GTX 550 Ti		21600 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 9600 GSO 1.5GB		6600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 15000 (227%)

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 (counted in megabytes per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in a second. It is worked out by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better 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 amount of pixels that the graphics chip can possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.