GeForce GT 440 1.5GB vs Radeon HD 5550

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 5550, which makes use of a 40 nm design. AMD has set the core speed at 550 MHz. The DDR2 memory is set to run at a frequency of 400 MHz on this card. It features 320(64x5) SPUs along with 16 Texture Address Units and 8 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the GeForce GT 440 1.5GB should in theory be much better than the Radeon HD 5550 overall. (explain)

GeForce GT 440 1.5GB		43200 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5550		12800 MB/sec
	Difference: 30400 (238%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GT 440 1.5GB will be a lot (approximately 62%) faster with regards to AF than the Radeon HD 5550. (explain)

GeForce GT 440 1.5GB		14256 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5550		8800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 5456 (62%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high screen resolution is important to you, then the GeForce GT 440 1.5GB is superior to the Radeon HD 5550, by a large margin. (explain)

GeForce GT 440 1.5GB		14256 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5550		4400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 9856 (224%)

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 (measured in megabytes per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface within a second. It's worked out by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the bandwidth is, 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that are processed in one second. This is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip could possibly write to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount 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 also depends 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.