GeForce GTX 465 vs Radeon HD 5550

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 5550, which has 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 Texture Address Units and 8 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the GeForce GTX 465 is 702% faster than the Radeon HD 5550 overall, due to its higher bandwidth. (explain)

GeForce GTX 465		102592 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5550		12800 MB/sec
	Difference: 89792 (702%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 465 should be a lot (more or less 204%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 5550. (explain)

GeForce GTX 465		26708 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5550		8800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 17908 (204%)

Pixel Rate

If using lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 465 is the winner, and very much so. (explain)

GeForce GTX 465		19424 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5550		4400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 15024 (341%)

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 information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in one second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be applied in one second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the graphics card can possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.