GeForce GTX 570 vs Radeon HD 5550

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 5550, which uses a 40 nm design. AMD has set the core speed at 550 MHz. The DDR2 memory is set to run at a speed of 400 MHz on this card. 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

The GeForce GTX 570 should in theory perform quite a bit faster than the Radeon HD 5550 overall. (explain)

GeForce GTX 570		152000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5550		12800 MB/sec
	Difference: 139200 (1088%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 570 will be much (about 399%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 5550. (explain)

GeForce GTX 570		43920 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5550		8800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 35120 (399%)

Pixel Rate

If using lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 570 is superior to the Radeon HD 5550, by far. (explain)

GeForce GTX 570		29280 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5550		4400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 24880 (565%)

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 (measured in MB per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface in one second. The number is calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the memory bandwidth, the better 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 texture map elements (texels) that can be processed in one second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the video card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics card could possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.