GeForce GT 450 (OEM) vs Radeon HD 5550

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 5550, which features a clock speed of 550 MHz and a DDR2 memory frequency of 400 MHz. It also uses a 128-bit bus, and uses a 40 nm design. It is comprised of 320(64x5) SPUs, 16 Texture Address Units, and 8 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

The GeForce GT 450 (OEM) should in theory perform quite a bit faster than the Radeon HD 5550 overall. (explain)

GeForce GT 450 (OEM)		96000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5550		12800 MB/sec
	Difference: 83200 (650%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GT 450 (OEM) should be a lot (about 115%) more effective at AF than the Radeon HD 5550. (explain)

GeForce GT 450 (OEM)		18960 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5550		8800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 10160 (115%)

Pixel Rate

If using lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the GeForce GT 450 (OEM) is the winner, by a large margin. (explain)

GeForce GT 450 (OEM)		18960 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5550		4400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 14560 (331%)

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 information (counted in MB per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface within a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If 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 high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be applied in one second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the graphics card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the graphics card can possibly write to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.