GeForce GTX 550 Ti vs Radeon HD 7870 XT

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 7870 XT, which features a GPU core clock speed of 925 MHz, and 2048 MB of GDDR5 RAM running at 1500 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is made up of 1536 Stream Processors, 96 Texture Address Units, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

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 7870 XT		6390 points
GeForce GTX 550 Ti		1897 points
	Difference: 4493 (237%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 550 Ti		116 Watts
Radeon HD 7870 XT		185 Watts
	Difference: 69 Watts (59%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 7870 XT, in theory, should perform much faster than the GeForce GTX 550 Ti in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870 XT		192000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 550 Ti		98496 MB/sec
	Difference: 93504 (95%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7870 XT should be much (approximately 208%) better at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTX 550 Ti. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870 XT		88800 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 550 Ti		28800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 60000 (208%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 7870 XT should be much (about 37%) faster with regards to FSAA than the GeForce GTX 550 Ti, and will be capable of handling higher screen resolutions more effectively. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870 XT		29600 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 550 Ti		21600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 8000 (37%)

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 maximum amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in one second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the graphics card could possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of 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 lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.