GeForce GTX 550 Ti vs Radeon HD 6870

Intro

The GeForce GTX 550 Ti has a core clock frequency of 900 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1026 MHz. It also uses a 192-bit memory bus, and makes use of a 40 nm design. It is comprised of 192 SPUs, 32 Texture Address Units, and 24 Raster Operation Units.

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 6870, which uses a 40 nm design. ATi has clocked the core frequency at 900 MHz. The GDDR5 memory is set to run at a speed of 1050 MHz on this specific card. It features 1120 SPUs as well as 56 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Price Comparison

Please note that the price comparisons are based on search keywords, and might not be the exact same card listed on this page. We have no control over the accuracy of their search results.

GeForce GTX 550 Ti Amazon.com Other US-based stores

Radeon HD 6870 Amazon.com Other US-based stores

Specifications

Model	GeForce GTX 550 Ti	Radeon HD 6870
Manufacturer	nVidia	ATi
Year	March 2011	October 2010
Code Name	GF116	Barts XT
Fab Process	40 nm	40 nm
Bus	PCIe 2.1 x16	PCIe x16
Memory	1024 MB	1024 MB
Core Speed	900 MHz	900 MHz
Shader Speed	1800 MHz	(N/A) MHz
Memory Speed	1026 MHz (4104 MHz effective)	1050 MHz (4200 MHz effective)
Unified Shaders	192	1120
Texture Mapping Units	32	56
Render Output Units	24	32
Bus Type	GDDR5	GDDR5
Bus Width	192-bit	256-bit
DirectX Version	DirectX 11	DirectX 11
OpenGL Version	OpenGL 4.1	OpenGL 4.1
Power (Max TDP)	116 watts	151 watts
Shader Model	5.0	5.0
Bandwidth	98496 MB/sec	134400 MB/sec
Texel Rate	28800 Mtexels/sec	50400 Mtexels/sec
Pixel Rate	21600 Mpixels/sec	28800 Mpixels/sec

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the maximum amount of data (in units of MB per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface within a second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the video 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 could possibly record to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.