GeForce GTX 1050 vs Radeon RX 550

Intro

The GeForce GTX 1050 makes use of a 14 nm design. nVidia has clocked the core frequency at 1354 MHz. The GDDR5 memory runs at a frequency of 1750 MHz on this particular model. It features 640 SPUs as well as 40 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Compare those specs to the Radeon RX 550, which comes with clock speeds of 1100 MHz on the GPU, and 1750 MHz on the 2048 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 512 SPUs as well as 32 TAUs and 16 ROPs.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the largest amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in one second. It's calculated by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, 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 number of texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the video card will be at handling 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 graphics card could possibly write to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.