GeForce GTX 580 vs Radeon HD 5550

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 5550, which makes use of a 40 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 550 MHz. The DDR2 memory runs at a frequency of 400 MHz on this model. 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

As far as performance goes, the GeForce GTX 580 should theoretically be quite a bit better than the Radeon HD 5550 in general. (explain)

GeForce GTX 580		192384 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5550		12800 MB/sec
	Difference: 179584 (1403%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 580 will be quite a bit (approximately 461%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 5550. (explain)

GeForce GTX 580		49408 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5550		8800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 40608 (461%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 580 will be a lot (more or less 742%) faster with regards to AA than the Radeon HD 5550, and capable of handling higher screen resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

GeForce GTX 580		37056 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5550		4400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 32656 (742%)

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 (counted in MB per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface within a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics card could possibly write to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.