GeForce GTX 950 vs Radeon HD 5550

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 5550, which makes use of a 40 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 550 MHz. The DDR2 memory works at a speed of 400 MHz on this specific model. It features 320(64x5) SPUs along with 16 Texture Address Units and 8 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the GeForce GTX 950 should in theory be much superior to the Radeon HD 5550 in general. (explain)

GeForce GTX 950		105728 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5550		12800 MB/sec
	Difference: 92928 (726%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 950 should be a lot (more or less 459%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 5550. (explain)

GeForce GTX 950		49152 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5550		8800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 40352 (459%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 950 is much (more or less 645%) more effective at anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 5550, and also able to handle higher screen resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

GeForce GTX 950		32768 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5550		4400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 28368 (645%)

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 largest amount of information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in one second. The number is worked out by multiplying the interface width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip could possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.