GeForce GTX 550 Ti vs Radeon HD 5970

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 5970, which comes with a clock frequency of 725 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1000 MHz. It also uses a 256-bit memory bus, and uses a 40 nm design. It features 1600 SPUs, 160 TAUs, and 64 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 550 Ti		116 Watts
Radeon HD 5970		294 Watts
	Difference: 178 Watts (153%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the Radeon HD 5970 should perform a lot faster than the GeForce GTX 550 Ti in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		256000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 550 Ti		98496 MB/sec
	Difference: 157504 (160%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5970 will be much (more or less 706%) more effective at AF than the GeForce GTX 550 Ti. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		232000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 550 Ti		28800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 203200 (706%)

Pixel Rate

If running with lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon HD 5970 is superior to the GeForce GTX 550 Ti, by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		92800 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 550 Ti		21600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 71200 (330%)

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 (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in one second. It is calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the graphics card can possibly record to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines 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 fill rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.