GeForce GTX 550 Ti vs Radeon HD 6870

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 6870, which features core clock speeds of 900 MHz on the GPU, and 1050 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 1120 SPUs along with 56 Texture Address Units 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 6870		2870 points
GeForce GTX 550 Ti		1897 points
	Difference: 973 (51%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 550 Ti		116 Watts
Radeon HD 6870		151 Watts
	Difference: 35 Watts (30%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 6870 will be 36% faster than the GeForce GTX 550 Ti in general, because of its higher data rate. (explain)

Radeon HD 6870		134400 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 550 Ti		98496 MB/sec
	Difference: 35904 (36%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6870 will be quite a bit (approximately 75%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the GeForce GTX 550 Ti. (explain)

Radeon HD 6870		50400 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 550 Ti		28800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 21600 (75%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 6870 will be quite a bit (about 33%) better at AA than the GeForce GTX 550 Ti, and should be capable of handling higher resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

Radeon HD 6870		28800 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 550 Ti		21600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 7200 (33%)

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 (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface within a second. It's calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This is calculated by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core 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 in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the video 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 number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the clock 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 also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.