GeForce GTX 460 vs Radeon HD 4550 512MB

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 4550 512MB, which comes with a clock speed of 600 MHz and a GDDR3 memory speed of 800 MHz. It also makes use of a 64-bit memory bus, and makes use of a 55 nm design. It is comprised of 80(16x5) SPUs, 8 Texture Address Units, and 4 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 4550 512MB		25 Watts
GeForce GTX 460		150 Watts
	Difference: 125 Watts (500%)

Memory Bandwidth

The GeForce GTX 460 should theoretically be much faster than the Radeon HD 4550 512MB overall. (explain)

GeForce GTX 460		86400 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4550 512MB		12800 MB/sec
	Difference: 73600 (575%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 460 is quite a bit (more or less 688%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 4550 512MB. (explain)

GeForce GTX 460		37800 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4550 512MB		4800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 33000 (688%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 460 is a better choice, and very much so. (explain)

GeForce GTX 460		16200 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4550 512MB		2400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 13800 (575%)

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 data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in a second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied in one second. This is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units 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 in one second.

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