Radeon HD 5550 vs Radeon HD 6950 2GB

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 6950 2GB, which makes use of a 40 nm design. AMD has set the core speed at 800 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM works at a speed of 1250 MHz on this particular model. It features 1408 SPUs as well as 88 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 6950 2GB should theoretically perform quite a bit faster than the Radeon HD 5550 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950 2GB		160000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5550		12800 MB/sec
	Difference: 147200 (1150%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6950 2GB should be a lot (about 700%) faster with regards to AF than the Radeon HD 5550. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950 2GB		70400 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5550		8800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 61600 (700%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 6950 2GB will be quite a bit (about 482%) more effective at anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 5550, and also should be able to handle higher screen resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950 2GB		25600 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5550		4400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 21200 (482%)

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 max amount of information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in one second. It is calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If 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 high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the video card can possibly record to the 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 clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on many 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.