I was looking at upgrading to http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814127608but I was wondering the difference between these two cards http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814130652 and http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814130683

The first is a 550 and the second is a 560, I have compared their stats side by side and the 550 is clocked higher all around but lacks almost half of the processor cores that the 560 has, also the 550 has a Memory Interface of 192-bit, while the 560 has 256-bit. Is this a very important feature? Is it worth paying $110 more? Or should I just get the card that I originally had my eye on? They all have 2gb of VRAM which is important.

I'm not very knowledgeable about video cards, sorry

Any help is appreciated.

Modern graphics cards rely on stream processors to do the bulk of the graphics processing, and their performance is linearly proportional to to the number of stream processors it has. So the gtx560 in your link should have around double the performance of the gtx550. The reduced memory bus width is just a side effect of the reduced stream processors.

As for the clock speed, the 550 is only clocked slightly higher than the 560, and will not make any significant inroads into the performance deficit. In any case, the 560 can be easily overclocked to the same speeds as the 550.

GTX560 all the way.

Agreed with more SP being more important than higher clocks, if you calculate single-precision floating point ops per second (compute processing power) its generally:

384SP @ 1645MHz = 631K FLOPs
192SP @ 1800MHz = 345K FLOPs

I can't remember if they perform 1 or 2 ops per clock but apples-to-apples its irrelevant. Also, the bigger ASICs generally benefit even more from a more robust rendering pipeline from TMUs, ROPs, to memory bus/bandwidth. The GTX 550 is really in a class far below the GTX 560/Ti regardless of its nomenclature.

The 2GB GTX 560Ti parts put you in a tough spot however. While 2GB would most certainly be welcome in Skyrim and some other recent games, but that price range puts you in spitting distance of something like this for $220: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814162090

That card is actually a different ASIC even though its a GTX 560Ti, using the GF110 (same as 570/580) but cut down a bit more. While it has less VRAM (1.2GB to 2GB) than the cards you're looking at, it also has more raw compute power, ROPs, TMUs, bandwidth etc.

VRAM is the LEAST important specification. Memory bandwidth is hugely more important than VRAM, although the SPEED of the RAM is important. Memory bandwidth is made up from memory speed and the number of bits that the memory system moves per operation. AFAIK, the number of shader or "stream" processors is independent of either the memory system bit length or the RAM's speed.

Use benchmarks for comparison when the specs appear too similar to you and you don't know enough to evaluate a comparison. Every month. Toms Hardware updates their "Bang for a Buck" articles to show you the best ratio of frames per dollar at various price points.

Most of the time, AMD Radeon cards hold the majority of the price points. You get more value from those cards.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/gaming-graphics-card-review,3107-4.html

Value is relative, I'd rather pay $50 more to go Nvidia, just to avoid a lot of ATI issues.

While this is generally true, we are seeing more and more games like Skyrim with a huge amount of textures that need to be held in memory. With the HD texture pack, even high end cards with 1.5GB VRAM are getting maxed out at high resolutions and high AA settings.

You are right in that the amount of VRAM has no impact on performance, but that needs to be qualified with the caveat of: "as long as VRAM usage does not exceed the amount of available VRAM". Otherwise performance is severely impacted.

Personally, for my next graphics card purchase, 2GB of VRAM will be a requirement, to avoid the unfortunate situation that I find myself in now, where I cannot use the high res texture pack without making compromises else where.

While bandwidth is always a great concern....... and usually isn't a huge problem..... the amount of VRAM or RAM is more important than speed..

if you have 512mb of the fastest ram in the world.. it'll still run slower than 1gb or 2gb of the slowest stuff in the world...

think of it like 2 race cars, one car has a 1/2 gallon of gas but can hit 100 mile and hour but only travel 5km at that speed before slowing to a near stop
meanwhile the other case with 1 gallon is able to hit 80 mile and hour and travel 10km before slowing to a near stop.... The destination is all the same, but unfortunately even with the faster car, it's going to be stopped much much MUCH sooner than the slower one.

MSI Twin Frozr all the way

The anology of an ordinary car versus the slightly speedier one is incomplete. The freeway has a minimum speed limit, so even if the Yugo has 200 gallons, it still has to take back roads (play MMOs, not Skyrim). A Geforce 210 isn't even as comparatively useful as a Yugo, compared to a GTX 550 Ti, and I suspect that a 210 isn't as useful as an Intel video chip, which has zero RAM of its own.

Ok guys.....don't make me get the hose.....

Thanks for the replies guy. I think I'm gonna go with the GTX 560 Ti twin frozr. btw, what is a twin frozr? It look like someone was typing the word "frozen but misspelled it. How do you even pronounce that? "Fro-zer"?

I recomend the EVGA GTX 560Ti of the 3.

My reasons? EVGA makes great cards, very overclockable, very reliable, will run cool. 560ti>550, faster card is faster. 560ti has twice the cuda cores.

Another vote for EVGA. Twin Frozr is just referring to the custom 2 fan heatsink on the card. Doesn't really make much difference. EVGA makes great quality cards that are very overclockable.

O.P., what are the rest of your PC's specs? CPU model? Power supply (capacity in watts)? Monitor resolution?

nVidia recently released the 448SP version of the GTX560 card. Might be worth checking out if the price is right.