GeForce GTX 460 vs Radeon HD 5550

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 5550, which features clock speeds of 550 MHz on the GPU, and 400 MHz on the 512 MB of DDR2 RAM. It features 320(64x5) SPUs as well as 16 TAUs and 8 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the GeForce GTX 460 should be 575% faster than the Radeon HD 5550 in general, because of its higher bandwidth. (explain)

GeForce GTX 460		86400 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5550		12800 MB/sec
	Difference: 73600 (575%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 460 is much (about 330%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 5550. (explain)

GeForce GTX 460		37800 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5550		8800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 29000 (330%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 460 will be a lot (approximately 268%) more effective at anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 5550, and also will be able to handle higher resolutions better. (explain)

GeForce GTX 460		16200 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5550		4400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 11800 (268%)

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 (in units of MB per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface in one second. The number is calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR type memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the 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 number of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed in one second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core 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 applied in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card could possibly write to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel 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.