Radeon HD 5550 vs Radeon HD 7770

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 7770, which comes with a core clock frequency of 1000 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1125 MHz. It also uses a 128-bit bus, and uses a 28 nm design. It is made up of 640 SPUs, 40 Texture Address Units, and 16 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 7770 should in theory perform quite a bit faster than the Radeon HD 5550 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 7770		72000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5550		12800 MB/sec
	Difference: 59200 (463%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7770 should be a lot (more or less 355%) more effective at AF than the Radeon HD 5550. (explain)

Radeon HD 7770		40000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5550		8800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 31200 (355%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 7770 is much (approximately 264%) faster with regards to FSAA than the Radeon HD 5550, and will be able to handle higher screen resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

Radeon HD 7770		16000 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5550		4400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 11600 (264%)

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 (in units of MB per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This is worked out by multiplying the total amount 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 applied per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the video card can possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel output rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.