GeForce GTX 980 vs Radeon HD 5550

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 5550, which has a core clock speed of 550 MHz and a DDR2 memory frequency of 400 MHz. It also uses a 128-bit bus, and makes use of a 40 nm design. It features 320(64x5) SPUs, 16 Texture Address Units, and 8 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the GeForce GTX 980 should perform quite a bit faster than the Radeon HD 5550 overall. (explain)

GeForce GTX 980		224000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5550		12800 MB/sec
	Difference: 211200 (1650%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 980 is much (more or less 1538%) faster with regards to AF than the Radeon HD 5550. (explain)

GeForce GTX 980		144128 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5550		8800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 135328 (1538%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 980 is a better choice, by far. (explain)

GeForce GTX 980		72064 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5550		4400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 67664 (1538%)

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 (measured in 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 speed. In the case of DDR memory, the result 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 AA, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be applied in one second. This is calculated by multiplying the total 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 processed in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the video card can 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 Render Output Units by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.