GeForce GTX 960 vs Radeon HD 5550

Intro

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

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

The GeForce GTX 960 should theoretically be quite a bit faster than the Radeon HD 5550 in general. (explain)

GeForce GTX 960		112000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5550		12800 MB/sec
	Difference: 99200 (775%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 960 will be much (approximately 720%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the Radeon HD 5550. (explain)

GeForce GTX 960		72128 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5550		8800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 63328 (720%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 960 is a lot (approximately 720%) more effective at AA than the Radeon HD 5550, and also will be capable of handling higher screen resolutions more effectively. (explain)

GeForce GTX 960		36064 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5550		4400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 31664 (720%)

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 max amount of data (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in a second. It is worked out by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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

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