Which is better for gaming faster GPU or more cores?

[AntaresUK]

Looking to buy a new machine from scan soon and was wondering which nvidia card to get, either

1GB EVGA GTX 550 Ti FPB 951MHz GPU 192 Cores 4356 Mhz GDDR5

or
1Gb EVGA GTX 560 Ti SC 900MHz GPU 384 Cores 4212Mhz GDDR5

so which is better for gaming faster gpu or more cores? I'd be gaming at 1920x1200 and like all the AA/AF on.

Cheers

[shaithis]

The 560Ti will slaughter the 550Ti

[kalniel]

As the above.

Performance is all about mitigating limiting factors - there will always be a limiting factor somewhere, depending on the demand. For gaming, the demand is mostly graphical - the CPU needs to be fast enough to keep the GPU fed, but beyond that the GPU is usually the limiting factor, especially if you're at highish resolution with maximum image quality enhancers like AA/AF.

Games also don't generally take advantage of more than four cores at the moment.

[AntaresUK]

thanks both. I wasnt talking about CPU cores, but graphics cores.

[kalniel]

thanks both. I wasnt talking about CPU cores, but graphics cores.

I see, no is the short answer. Even defining a 'core' in a GPU is difficult as they're not consistent between makes and models - so even if they were the sole performance factor you couldn't use them to determine relative performance, but they're actually just one part of performance as well. Even speed isn't easily defined because different parts of a GPU operate at different frequencies.

So go off reviews and benchmarks to determine performance, never frequency or 'cores' (unless everything else is equal).