In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the Nvidia GeForce GTX 650 Ti Gainward 1GB Edition are significantly better than the Nvidia GeForce 9800 GTX SLI.

The GTX 650 Ti has a 253 MHz higher core clock speed than the 9800 GTX, but the 9800 GTX has 48 more Texture Mapping Units than the GTX 650 Ti. As a result, the 9800 GTX exhibits a 16.2 GTexel/s better Texture Fill Rate than the GTX 650 Ti. This still holds weight but shader performance is generally more relevant, particularly since both of these GPUs support at least DirectX 10.

The GTX 650 Ti has a 253 MHz higher core clock speed than the 9800 GTX, but the 9800 GTX has 16 more Render Output Units than the GTX 650 Ti. As a result, the 9800 GTX exhibits a 6.8 GPixel/s better Pixel Fill Rate than the GTX 650 Ti. However, both GPUs support DirectX 9 or above, and pixeling performance is only really relevant when comparing older cards.

The GTX 650 Ti was released over three years more recently than the 9800 GTX, and so the GTX 650 Ti is likely to have far better driver support, meaning it will be much more optimized and ultimately superior to the 9800 GTX when running the latest games.

The GeForce 9800 GTX SLI and the GeForce GTX 650 Ti Gainward 1GB Edition have the same amount of video memory, but are likely to provide slightly different experiences when displaying game textures at high resolutions.

The 9800 GTX has 54.4 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the GTX 650 Ti, which means that the memory performance of the 9800 GTX is much better than the GTX 650 Ti.

The GeForce 9800 GTX SLI has 128 Shader Processing Units and the GeForce GTX 650 Ti Gainward 1GB Edition has 768. However, the actual shader performance of the 9800 GTX is 86 and the actual shader performance of the GTX 650 Ti is 713. The GTX 650 Ti having 627 better shader performance is not particularly notable, as altogether the 9800 GTX performs better when taking into account other relevant data.

The GTX 650 Ti transistor size technology is 37 nm (nanometers) smaller than the 9800 GTX. This means that the GTX 650 Ti is expected to run much cooler and achieve higher clock frequencies than the 9800 GTX.

The GeForce 9800 GTX SLI requires 280 Watts to run but there is no entry for the GeForce GTX 650 Ti Gainward 1GB Edition. We would recommend a PSU with at least 600 Watts for the 9800 GTX.