GeForce GT 450 (OEM) vs Radeon HD 5550

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 5550, which has GPU core speed of 550 MHz, and 512 MB of DDR2 RAM running at 400 MHz through a 128-bit bus. It also is comprised of 320(64x5) SPUs, 16 Texture Address Units, and 8 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

The GeForce GT 450 (OEM) should theoretically perform much 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 much (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 a better choice, by far. (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 (in units of MB per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface within a second. It's worked out by multiplying the interface width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. 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 are applied in one second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core clock 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 processed per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics card can possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.