Radeon HD 5550 vs Radeon HD 5570

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 5570, which comes with core clock speeds of 650 MHz on the GPU, and 900 MHz on the 512 MB of DDR3 RAM. It features 400(80x5) SPUs along with 20 Texture Address Units and 8 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 5570, in theory, should be quite a bit faster than the Radeon HD 5550 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 5570		28800 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5550		12800 MB/sec
	Difference: 16000 (125%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5570 is a lot (about 48%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 5550. (explain)

Radeon HD 5570		13000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5550		8800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 4200 (48%)

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 5570 is a better choice, though not by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 5570		5200 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5550		4400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 800 (18%)

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: Memory bandwidth is the maximum amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface within a second. It is worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed in one second. This number is calculated 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 per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card could possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.