GeForce GT 450 (OEM) vs Radeon HD 5550

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 5550, which comes with GPU core 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 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the GeForce GT 450 (OEM) should 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) will be quite a bit (about 115%) faster with regards to 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: Bandwidth is the max amount of data (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface within a second. It is worked out by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, the better 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 are processed in one second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the 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 number of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.