GeForce GT 340 vs Radeon HD 4550 512MB

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 4550 512MB, which has clock speeds of 600 MHz on the GPU, and 800 MHz on the 512 MB of GDDR3 memory. It features 80(16x5) SPUs as well as 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 512MB		25 Watts
GeForce GT 340		69 Watts
	Difference: 44 Watts (176%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the GeForce GT 340 will be 325% quicker than the Radeon HD 4550 512MB overall, due to its greater bandwidth. (explain)

GeForce GT 340		54400 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4550 512MB		12800 MB/sec
	Difference: 41600 (325%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GT 340 will be much (approximately 267%) more effective at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 4550 512MB. (explain)

GeForce GT 340		17600 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4550 512MB		4800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 12800 (267%)

Pixel Rate

If running with lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the GeForce GT 340 is a better choice, and very much so. (explain)

GeForce GT 340		4400 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4550 512MB		2400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 2000 (83%)

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 (measured in MB per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface within a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be processed in one second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the video card will be at 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 graphics card can possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.