GeForce GTX 550 Ti vs Radeon HD 6970

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 6970, which comes with a core clock speed of 880 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1375 MHz. It also uses a 256-bit memory bus, and makes use of 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

Theoretically, the Radeon HD 6970 should perform much faster than the GeForce GTX 550 Ti overall. (explain)

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

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6970 will be a lot (more or less 193%) faster with regards to AF 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

The Radeon HD 6970 will be much (more or less 30%) more effective at full screen anti-aliasing than the GeForce GTX 550 Ti, and should be able to handle higher resolutions without slowing down too much. (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: Memory bandwidth is the max amount of information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in one second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the memory bandwidth, the better 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 applied per second. This is worked out by multiplying the total 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 handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the video card can possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.