GeForce GTX 570 vs Radeon HD 5550

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 5550, which comes with a core clock speed of 550 MHz and a DDR2 memory frequency of 400 MHz. It also makes use of a 128-bit memory bus, and makes use of a 40 nm design. It is comprised of 320(64x5) SPUs, 16 TAUs, and 8 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the GeForce GTX 570 should be much 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 should be quite a bit (more or less 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 running with a high resolution is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 570 is superior to the Radeon HD 5550, by a large margin. (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: Bandwidth is the max amount of information (in units of MB per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in one second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the video card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed per second.

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