GeForce GTX 560 Ti vs Radeon HD 4550 256MB

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 4550 256MB, which has core speeds of 600 MHz on the GPU, and 800 MHz on the 256 MB of DDR3 memory. It features 80(16x5) SPUs as well as 8 Texture Address Units and 4 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 4550 256MB		25 Watts
GeForce GTX 560 Ti		170 Watts
	Difference: 145 Watts (580%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the GeForce GTX 560 Ti should be quite a bit faster than the Radeon HD 4550 256MB in general. (explain)

GeForce GTX 560 Ti		128256 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4550 256MB		12800 MB/sec
	Difference: 115456 (902%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 560 Ti should be much (more or less 996%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 4550 256MB. (explain)

GeForce GTX 560 Ti		52608 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4550 256MB		4800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 47808 (996%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high screen resolution is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 560 Ti is the winner, by far. (explain)

GeForce GTX 560 Ti		26304 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4550 256MB		2400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 23904 (996%)

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 largest amount of information (in units of MB per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR type memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be applied in one second. This is calculated by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the graphics card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics card can possibly write to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the core clock speed. 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 also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.