Radeon HD 5550 vs Radeon HD 5970

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 5970, which makes use of a 40 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 725 MHz. The GDDR5 memory runs at a speed of 1000 MHz on this card. It features 1600 SPUs as well as 160 Texture Address Units and 64 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 5970 should be 1900% quicker than the Radeon HD 5550 in general, because of its greater bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		256000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5550		12800 MB/sec
	Difference: 243200 (1900%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5970 is quite a bit (approximately 2536%) better at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 5550. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		232000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5550		8800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 223200 (2536%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 5970 is the winner, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		92800 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5550		4400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 88400 (2009%)

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.

One or more cards in this comparison are multi-core. This means that their bandwidth, texel and pixel rates are theoretically doubled - this does not mean the card will actually perform twice as fast, but only that it should in theory be able to. Actual game benchmarks will give a more accurate idea of what it's capable of.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the max amount of data (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in a second. It's worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen 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 by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the 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 amount of pixels that the graphics card could possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.