GeForce 9800 GX2 vs GeForce GTX 550 Ti

Intro

Compare that to the GeForce GTX 550 Ti, which comes with a clock speed 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.

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

Performance-wise, the GeForce 9800 GX2 should theoretically be much better than the GeForce GTX 550 Ti overall. (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 much (about 167%) faster with regards to texture 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 small bit (approximately 13%) more effective at AA than the GeForce 9800 GX2, and should be able to handle higher screen resolutions more effectively. (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 maximum amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in one second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the graphics card could possibly record to its 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 clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.