GeForce GT 320 vs Radeon HD 4550 256MB

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 4550 256MB, which comes with a GPU core clock speed of 600 MHz, and 256 MB of DDR3 RAM running at 800 MHz through a 64-bit bus. It also is made up of 80(16x5) Stream Processors, 8 Texture Address Units, and 4 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 4550 256MB		25 Watts
GeForce GT 320		43 Watts
	Difference: 18 Watts (72%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the GeForce GT 320 should perform a lot faster than the Radeon HD 4550 256MB overall. (explain)

GeForce GT 320		25280 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4550 256MB		12800 MB/sec
	Difference: 12480 (98%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GT 320 will be a lot (more or less 170%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 4550 256MB. (explain)

GeForce GT 320		12960 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4550 256MB		4800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 8160 (170%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GT 320 will be quite a bit (more or less 80%) more effective at anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 4550 256MB, and will be able to handle higher screen resolutions more effectively. (explain)

GeForce GT 320		4320 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4550 256MB		2400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 1920 (80%)

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 max amount of data (measured in MB per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in one second. It's calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed in one second. This is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the video 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 graphics card could possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called 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 potential to reach the maximum fill rate.