GeForce GTS 450 1GB vs Radeon HD 5550

Intro

Compare all of that 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 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

The GeForce GTS 450 1GB should theoretically be quite a bit faster than the Radeon HD 5550 overall. (explain)

GeForce GTS 450 1GB		57728 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5550		12800 MB/sec
	Difference: 44928 (351%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTS 450 1GB is quite a bit (about 185%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 5550. (explain)

GeForce GTS 450 1GB		25056 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5550		8800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 16256 (185%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high resolution is important to you, then the GeForce GTS 450 1GB is the winner, by far. (explain)

GeForce GTS 450 1GB		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: Memory bandwidth is the maximum amount of information (counted in MB per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in a second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, 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 applied in one second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core clock 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 processed per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card could possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.