GeForce GT 240 GDDR5 1GB vs Radeon HD 4550 512MB

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 4550 512MB, which has core clock speeds of 600 MHz on the GPU, and 800 MHz on the 512 MB of GDDR3 RAM. It features 80(16x5) SPUs along with 8 Texture Address Units and 4 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 4550 512MB		25 Watts
GeForce GT 240 GDDR5 1GB		70 Watts
	Difference: 45 Watts (180%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the GeForce GT 240 GDDR5 1GB should perform much faster than the Radeon HD 4550 512MB overall. (explain)

GeForce GT 240 GDDR5 1GB		54400 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4550 512MB		12800 MB/sec
	Difference: 41600 (325%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GT 240 GDDR5 1GB is a lot (approximately 267%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 4550 512MB. (explain)

GeForce GT 240 GDDR5 1GB		17600 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4550 512MB		4800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 12800 (267%)

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the GeForce GT 240 GDDR5 1GB is a better choice, by a large margin. (explain)

GeForce GT 240 GDDR5 1GB		4400 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4550 512MB		2400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 2000 (83%)

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 information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in one second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

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