GeForce GTX 550 Ti vs Radeon HD 7850

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 7850, which comes with core clock speeds of 860 MHz on the GPU, and 1200 MHz on the 2048 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 1024 SPUs along with 64 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

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 7850		5200 points
GeForce GTX 550 Ti		1897 points
	Difference: 3303 (174%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 550 Ti		116 Watts
Radeon HD 7850		130 Watts
	Difference: 14 Watts (12%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 7850 should in theory perform quite a bit faster than the GeForce GTX 550 Ti overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 7850		153600 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 550 Ti		98496 MB/sec
	Difference: 55104 (56%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7850 will be much (approximately 91%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the GeForce GTX 550 Ti. (explain)

Radeon HD 7850		55040 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 550 Ti		28800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 26240 (91%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 7850 is the winner, by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 7850		27520 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 550 Ti		21600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 5920 (27%)

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 data (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in a second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better 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 number of texture map elements (texels) that are processed in one second. This is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the graphics card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics chip can possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.