GeForce GT 320 vs Radeon HD 5550

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 5550, which comes with clock speeds of 550 MHz on the GPU, and 400 MHz on the 512 MB of DDR2 RAM. It features 320(64x5) SPUs along with 16 TAUs and 8 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the GeForce GT 320 should be 98% faster than the Radeon HD 5550 overall, due to its greater data rate. (explain)

GeForce GT 320		25280 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5550		12800 MB/sec
	Difference: 12480 (98%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GT 320 is a lot (more or less 47%) better at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 5550. (explain)

GeForce GT 320		12960 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5550		8800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 4160 (47%)

Pixel Rate

If using lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon HD 5550 is superior to the GeForce GT 320, though not by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 5550		4400 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GT 320		4320 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 80 (2%)

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 transferred past the external memory interface within a second. It is calculated by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are processed in one second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the 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 amount of pixels the video card can possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of colour 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 fill rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.