Geforce GTX 690 vs Radeon HD 5550

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 5550, which makes use of a 40 nm design. AMD has set the core speed at 550 MHz. The DDR2 memory is set to run at a speed of 400 MHz on this specific model. It features 320(64x5) SPUs along with 16 Texture Address Units and 8 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

The Geforce GTX 690, in theory, should perform quite a bit faster than the Radeon HD 5550 overall. (explain)

Geforce GTX 690		384512 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5550		12800 MB/sec
	Difference: 371712 (2904%)

Texel Rate

The Geforce GTX 690 will be quite a bit (approximately 2562%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 5550. (explain)

Geforce GTX 690		234240 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5550		8800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 225440 (2562%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Geforce GTX 690 is the winner, by a large margin. (explain)

Geforce GTX 690		58560 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5550		4400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 54160 (1231%)

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.

One or more cards in this comparison are multi-core. This means that their bandwidth, texel and pixel rates are theoretically doubled - this does not mean the card will actually perform twice as fast, but only that it should in theory be able to. Actual game benchmarks will give a more accurate idea of what it's capable of.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the max amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface within a second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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

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