Radeon HD 5550 vs Radeon HD 7970

Intro

Compare those specs 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 is set to run at a speed of 1375 MHz on this model. It features 2048 SPUs as well as 128 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 7970 is 1963% quicker than the Radeon HD 5550 in general, because of its greater data rate. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		264000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5550		12800 MB/sec
	Difference: 251200 (1963%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7970 is quite a bit (about 1245%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 5550. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		118400 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5550		8800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 109600 (1245%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 7970 is superior to the Radeon HD 5550, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		29600 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5550		4400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 25200 (573%)

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: Memory bandwidth is the maximum amount of information (counted in MB per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in one second. The number is calculated by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip can possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.