GeForce GTX 970M vs Radeon HD 5550

Intro

The GeForce GTX 970M features core speeds of 924 MHz on the GPU, and 1000 MHz on the 3072 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 1280 SPUs along with 80 Texture Address Units and 48 ROPs.

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 5550, which comes with GPU clock speed of 550 MHz, and 512 MB of DDR2 memory running at 400 MHz through a 128-bit bus. It also features 320(64x5) SPUs, 16 TAUs, and 8 ROPs.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the maximum amount of information (counted in MB per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface within a second. It's worked out by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the video card could possibly record to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the clock 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 rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.