Radeon HD 5550 vs Radeon HD 6990

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 6990, which has a core clock frequency of 830 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1250 MHz. It also makes use of a 256-bit bus, and uses a 40 nm design. It is comprised of 1536 SPUs, 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 a lot 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 a lot (about 1711%) faster with regards to AF than the Radeon HD 5550. (explain)

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

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 6990 is much (about 1107%) faster with regards to AA than the Radeon HD 5550, and will be able to handle higher resolutions better. (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: Bandwidth is the max amount of data (measured in megabytes per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface within a second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the 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 the graphics card could possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.