Radeon HD 5550 vs Radeon R9 295X2

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon R9 295X2, which comes with core speeds of 1018 MHz on the GPU, and 1250 MHz on the 4096 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 2816 SPUs as well as 176 Texture Address Units and 64 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon R9 295X2, in theory, should perform a lot faster than the Radeon HD 5550 in general. (explain)

Radeon R9 295X2		640000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5550		12800 MB/sec
	Difference: 627200 (4900%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 295X2 will be much (approximately 3972%) better at AF than the Radeon HD 5550. (explain)

Radeon R9 295X2		358336 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5550		8800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 349536 (3972%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon R9 295X2 is a better choice, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon R9 295X2		130304 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5550		4400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 125904 (2861%)

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 information (counted in MB per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface within a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses 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, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

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