GeForce GTX 550 Ti vs Radeon HD 6970

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 6970, which has a clock frequency of 880 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1375 MHz. It also features a 256-bit bus, and uses a 40 nm design. It is made up of 1536 SPUs, 96 TAUs, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

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 6970		3470 points
GeForce GTX 550 Ti		1897 points
	Difference: 1573 (83%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 550 Ti		116 Watts
Radeon HD 6970		250 Watts
	Difference: 134 Watts (116%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 6970 should perform a lot faster than the GeForce GTX 550 Ti in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		176000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 550 Ti		98496 MB/sec
	Difference: 77504 (79%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6970 is much (about 193%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the GeForce GTX 550 Ti. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		84480 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 550 Ti		28800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 55680 (193%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6970 is superior to the GeForce GTX 550 Ti, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		28160 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 550 Ti		21600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 6560 (30%)

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.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the largest amount of information (measured in MB per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface within a second. It is calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the 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 texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the video card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the graphics card can possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel output rate also depends 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.