GeForce GTX 550 Ti vs Radeon HD 6990

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 6990, which uses a 40 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 830 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM works at a frequency of 1250 MHz on this model. It features 1536 SPUs along with 96 TAUs and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Benchmarks

These are real-world performance benchmarks that were submitted by Hardware Compare users. The scores seen here are the average of all benchmarks submitted for each respective test and hardware.

3DMark Fire Strike Graphics Score

Radeon HD 6990		5820 points
GeForce GTX 550 Ti		1897 points
	Difference: 3923 (207%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 550 Ti		116 Watts
Radeon HD 6990		375 Watts
	Difference: 259 Watts (223%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 6990 is 225% faster than the GeForce GTX 550 Ti in general, because of its higher bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon HD 6990		320000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 550 Ti		98496 MB/sec
	Difference: 221504 (225%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6990 should be a lot (more or less 453%) more effective at AF than the GeForce GTX 550 Ti. (explain)

Radeon HD 6990		159360 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 550 Ti		28800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 130560 (453%)

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6990 is superior to the GeForce GTX 550 Ti, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon HD 6990		53120 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 550 Ti		21600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 31520 (146%)

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 information (measured in MB per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface within a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, the faster 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 are processed in one second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core 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 applied per second.

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