GeForce GT 210 vs Radeon HD 5550

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 5550, which has a clock speed of 550 MHz and a DDR2 memory speed of 400 MHz. It also uses a 128-bit bus, and uses a 40 nm design. It is made up of 320(64x5) SPUs, 16 TAUs, and 8 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Both cards have exactly the same bandwidth, so in theory they should have identical performance. (explain)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5550 should be quite a bit (approximately 87%) more effective at texture filtering than the GeForce GT 210. (explain)

Radeon HD 5550		8800 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GT 210		4712 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 4088 (87%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 5550 is the winner, by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 5550		4400 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GT 210		2356 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 2044 (87%)

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 (in units of MB per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. 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 number of texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, 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 the video card could possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number 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 rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.