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Radeon HD 5550 vs Radeon HD 7870

Intro

The Radeon HD 5550 comes with a GPU clock speed of 550 MHz, and the 512 MB of DDR2 memory is set to run at 400 MHz through a 128-bit bus. It also is made up of 320(64x5) SPUs, 16 TAUs, and 8 ROPs.

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 7870, which uses a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 1000 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM is set to run at a frequency of 1200 MHz on this particular card. It features 1280 SPUs as well as 80 TAUs and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 7870 should in theory perform much faster than the Radeon HD 5550 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870 153600 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5550 12800 MB/sec
Difference: 140800 (1100%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7870 is much (approximately 809%) better at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 5550. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870 80000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5550 8800 Mtexels/sec
Difference: 71200 (809%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 7870 is a better choice, by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870 32000 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5550 4400 Mpixels/sec
Difference: 27600 (627%)

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

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Radeon HD 5550

Amazon.com

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Radeon HD 7870

Amazon.com

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Please note that the price comparisons are based on search keywords - sometimes it might show cards with very similar names that are not exactly the same as the one chosen in the comparison. We do try to filter out the wrong results as best we can, though.

Specifications

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Model Radeon HD 5550 Radeon HD 7870
Manufacturer AMD AMD
Year February 9, 2010 March 2012
Code Name Redwood LE Pitcairn XT
Memory 512 MB 2048 MB
Core Speed 550 MHz 1000 MHz
Memory Speed 800 MHz 4800 MHz
Power (Max TDP) (Unknown) watts 175 watts
Bandwidth 12800 MB/sec 153600 MB/sec
Texel Rate 8800 Mtexels/sec 80000 Mtexels/sec
Pixel Rate 4400 Mpixels/sec 32000 Mpixels/sec
Unified Shaders 320(64x5) 1280
Texture Mapping Units 16 80
Render Output Units 8 32
Bus Type DDR2 GDDR5
Bus Width 128-bit 256-bit
Fab Process 40 nm 28 nm
Transistors 627 million 2800 million
Bus PCIe 2.1 x16 PCIe 3.0 x16
DirectX Version DirectX 11 DirectX 11.1
OpenGL Version OpenGL 3.2 OpenGL 4.2

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the largest amount of data (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface within a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR type RAM, it should 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, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the graphics card will be at handling 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 the graphics card could possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.

Display Prices

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Radeon HD 5550

Amazon.com

Check prices at:

Radeon HD 7870

Amazon.com

Check prices at:

Please note that the price comparisons are based on search keywords - sometimes it might show cards with very similar names that are not exactly the same as the one chosen in the comparison. We do try to filter out the wrong results as best we can, though.

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