GeForce GTX 550 Ti vs Radeon R9 M280X

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon R9 M280X, which has GPU clock speed of 900 MHz, and 4096 MB of GDDR5 memory running at 1375 MHz through a 128-bit bus. It also features 896 SPUs, 56 Texture Address Units, and 16 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R9 M280X		75 Watts
GeForce GTX 550 Ti		116 Watts
	Difference: 41 Watts (55%)

Memory Bandwidth

The GeForce GTX 550 Ti should in theory be just a bit faster than the Radeon R9 M280X overall. (explain)

GeForce GTX 550 Ti		98496 MB/sec
Radeon R9 M280X		88000 MB/sec
	Difference: 10496 (12%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 M280X is a lot (approximately 75%) faster with regards to AF than the GeForce GTX 550 Ti. (explain)

Radeon R9 M280X		50400 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 550 Ti		28800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 21600 (75%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 550 Ti is superior to the Radeon R9 M280X, by far. (explain)

GeForce GTX 550 Ti		21600 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 M280X		14400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 7200 (50%)

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 maximum amount of information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in one second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics card could possibly write to its local memory in a 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 - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.