Radeon HD 5550 vs Radeon HD 6990

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 6990, which uses a 40 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 830 MHz. The GDDR5 memory runs at a speed of 1250 MHz on this particular card. It features 1536 SPUs as well as 96 TAUs and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon HD 6990 should in theory be much superior to the Radeon HD 5550 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 6990		320000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5550		12800 MB/sec
	Difference: 307200 (2400%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6990 will be quite a bit (approximately 1711%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 5550. (explain)

Radeon HD 6990		159360 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5550		8800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 150560 (1711%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6990 is superior to the Radeon HD 5550, by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 6990		53120 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5550		4400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 48720 (1107%)

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: Memory bandwidth is the maximum amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip could possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.