GeForce GTX 550 Ti vs Radeon HD 7970

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 7970, which features a clock speed of 925 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1375 MHz. It also makes use of a 384-bit bus, and makes use of a 28 nm design. It is made up of 2048 SPUs, 128 Texture Address Units, and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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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

In theory, the Radeon HD 7970 should be 168% faster than the GeForce GTX 550 Ti overall, because of its higher data rate. (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 (more or less 311%) better 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 will be a lot (more or less 37%) more effective at full screen anti-aliasing than the GeForce GTX 550 Ti, and also should be able to handle higher resolutions without losing too much performance. (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 information (measured in MB per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface in one second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the graphics card could possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as 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 of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.