NVIDIA GeForce GT 740 GDDR5 vs GTX 550 Ti

Despite of lower graphics clock, the GeForce GTX 550 Ti comes with better pixel fill rate, thanks to many more ROPs. Better pixel fill rate allows more pixels to be drawn on screen per second, and is an indication of better GPU performance, unless the graphics card is limited by something else, such as texture fillrate, CPU speed or available memory bandwidth.

Pixel fill rate was a critical parameter years ago, but not so much these days. Texture fill rate has more significance in modern games. There are two factors that influence this fillrate. They are the number of TMUs (Texture Mapping Units) and graphics clock. The GeForce GT 740 GDDR5 has an edge here, as it runs at higher frequency, and both GPUs have the same number of TMUs. Better texture fill rate allows the GPU to apply more textures and/or utilize more sophisticated 3D effects for each texel, which improves games visual appearance.

Maximum Single Precision performance indicates how many single-precision floating point operations the graphics card can execute per second. The performance is measured in billions of Floating Point Operations Per Second, or GFLOPS. As a rule, the faster stream processors or CUDA cores operate at, and the more cores / processors the graphics card has, the higher Single Precision performance will be. The NVIDIA GeForce GT 740 GDDR5 is faster here. Higher single-precision performance number means the graphics 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 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 GPU to run at higher display resolutions, use larger and more detailed textures, and apply more complex 3D effects and filters. The bandwidth is dependent on several components, such as memory type, speed, and width of memory interface. Specifically, the GeForce GTX 550 Ti comes with wider memory bus. As a result, it has higher memory bandwidth.