GeForce GT 420 vs Radeon HD 5550

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 5550, which has a GPU core clock speed of 550 MHz, and 512 MB of DDR2 memory set to run at 400 MHz through a 128-bit bus. It also is made up of 320(64x5) SPUs, 16 Texture Address Units, and 8 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

The GeForce GT 420, in theory, should be much faster than the Radeon HD 5550 in general. (explain)

GeForce GT 420		28800 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5550		12800 MB/sec
	Difference: 16000 (125%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5550 will be much (approximately 57%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GT 420. (explain)

Radeon HD 5550		8800 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GT 420		5600 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 3200 (57%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 5550 will be a lot (approximately 57%) more effective at AA than the GeForce GT 420, and also will be able to handle higher resolutions better. (explain)

Radeon HD 5550		4400 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GT 420		2800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 1600 (57%)

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 maximum amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface within a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If 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 amount of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the video card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called 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, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.