GeForce GTS 450 vs Radeon HD 5550

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 5550, which features a core clock frequency of 550 MHz and a DDR2 memory speed of 400 MHz. It also uses a 128-bit bus, and makes use of a 40 nm design. It is comprised of 320(64x5) SPUs, 16 TAUs, and 8 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

The GeForce GTS 450, in theory, should be a lot faster than the Radeon HD 5550 in general. (explain)

GeForce GTS 450		57728 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5550		12800 MB/sec
	Difference: 44928 (351%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTS 450 will be a lot (approximately 185%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 5550. (explain)

GeForce GTS 450		25056 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5550		8800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 16256 (185%)

Pixel Rate

If using lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the GeForce GTS 450 is superior to the Radeon HD 5550, by a large margin. (explain)

GeForce GTS 450		12528 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5550		4400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 8128 (185%)

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 largest amount of data (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface within a second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed in one second. This is worked out by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the 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 number of pixels that the graphics card 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 clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.