GeForce GTX 460 (OEM) vs Radeon HD 5550

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 5550, which has core speeds of 550 MHz on the GPU, and 400 MHz on the 512 MB of DDR2 memory. 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

As far as performance goes, the GeForce GTX 460 (OEM) should in theory be quite a bit better than the Radeon HD 5550 in general. (explain)

GeForce GTX 460 (OEM)		108800 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5550		12800 MB/sec
	Difference: 96000 (750%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 460 (OEM) should be quite a bit (about 314%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the Radeon HD 5550. (explain)

GeForce GTX 460 (OEM)		36400 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5550		8800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 27600 (314%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 460 (OEM) is a lot (approximately 373%) better at anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 5550, and capable of handling higher resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

GeForce GTX 460 (OEM)		20800 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5550		4400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 16400 (373%)

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 transferred over the external memory interface in a second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better 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 number of texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one second. This is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied per second.

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