GeForce GT 130 vs Radeon HD 5550

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 5550, which has a GPU core clock speed of 550 MHz, and 512 MB of DDR2 memory running at 400 MHz through a 128-bit bus. It also is comprised of 320(64x5) Stream Processors, 16 Texture Address Units, and 8 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 5550 should theoretically perform just a bit faster than the GeForce GT 130 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 5550		12800 MB/sec
GeForce GT 130		12000 MB/sec
	Difference: 800 (7%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GT 130 will be quite a bit (approximately 36%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 5550. (explain)

GeForce GT 130		12000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5550		8800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 3200 (36%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high screen resolution is important to you, then the GeForce GT 130 is the winner, and very much so. (explain)

GeForce GT 130		8000 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5550		4400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 3600 (82%)

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 (counted in MB per second) that can be transported past 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 must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the video card can possibly write to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.