NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GT vs GTX 650

Since both cards have the same number of ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines), and the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 650 graphics card has higher operating frequency, it also has higher pixel fillrate. Having better pixel fillrate allows the graphics card to draw more pixels on screen and off screen, which is beneficial for some 3D effects in games, or when playing at higher display resolutions.

Another important parameter, that affects overall graphics card performance, is texture fillrate. This parameter is proportional to the number of TMUs (Texture Mapping Units) and graphics clock speed. Although the GeForce GTX 650 has fewer Texture Mapping Units (TMUs), it is clocked considerably higher, as a result it has insignificantly higher texture fillrate. Having better texture fill rate allows the graphics card to use more sophisticated 3D effects and/or map more textures to each textured picture element, which improves games visual appearance.

Maximum Single Precision performance shows how many single-precision floating point operations the GPU can execute per second. The performance is measured in billions of Floating Point Operations Per Second, or GFLOPS. As a rule, the more CUDA cores or stream processors the graphics unit has, and the the faster they run at, the higher Single Precision performance will be. The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 650 has a very big advantage here. Higher single-precision performance number means the card will perform better in general computing applications. Since CUDA cores or stream processors are also used as vertex and geometry shaders for 3D image generation, higher performance is also beneficial to games.

To speed up processing, the graphics cards store 3D scene data, textures and intermediate data, used for image generation, in on-board memory. The video memory usually has much higher bandwidth than system RAM, and more bandwidth allows the graphics card to run at higher screen resolutions, use larger and more detailed textures, and apply more complex 3D effects and filters. The bandwidth is dependent on memory type, speed, and memory interface width. Specifically, the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 650 offers higher clocked memory of better kind. As such, it has higher memory bandwidth.