Radeon HD 5550 vs Radeon HD 7770

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 7770, which has a core clock speed of 1000 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1125 MHz. It also uses a 128-bit bus, and makes use of a 28 nm design. It features 640 SPUs, 40 TAUs, and 16 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 7770 should be 463% quicker than the Radeon HD 5550 overall, due to its higher bandwidth. (explain)

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

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7770 will be quite a bit (more or less 355%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering 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 will be a lot (about 264%) better at FSAA than the Radeon HD 5550, and also 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 largest amount of data (counted in MB per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in one second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card can possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.