GeForce GTX 550 Ti vs Radeon HD 7970

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 7970, which makes use of a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 925 MHz. The GDDR5 memory runs at a frequency of 1375 MHz on this specific card. It features 2048 SPUs along with 128 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Benchmarks

These are real-world performance benchmarks that were submitted by Hardware Compare users. The scores seen here are the average of all benchmarks submitted for each respective test and hardware.

3DMark Fire Strike Graphics Score

Radeon HD 7970		8225 points
GeForce GTX 550 Ti		1897 points
	Difference: 6328 (334%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 550 Ti		116 Watts
Radeon HD 7970		250 Watts
	Difference: 134 Watts (116%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the Radeon HD 7970 should perform a lot faster than the GeForce GTX 550 Ti in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		264000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 550 Ti		98496 MB/sec
	Difference: 165504 (168%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7970 will be a lot (about 311%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTX 550 Ti. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		118400 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 550 Ti		28800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 89600 (311%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 7970 should be quite a bit (about 37%) more effective at AA than the GeForce GTX 550 Ti, and also able to handle higher screen resolutions while still performing well. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		29600 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 550 Ti		21600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 8000 (37%)

Please note that the above 'benchmarks' are all just theoretical - the results were calculated based on the card's specifications, and real-world performance may (and probably will) vary at least a bit.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the max amount of data (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR type memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the video card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the graphics card could possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.