GeForce GTX 550 Ti vs Radeon HD 6870

Intro

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

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 6870, which comes with GPU core speed of 900 MHz, and 1024 MB of GDDR5 RAM set to run at 1050 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is comprised of 1120 Stream Processors, 56 TAUs, and 32 ROPs.

Price Comparison

GeForce GTX 550 Ti Amazon.com

Radeon HD 6870 Amazon.com

Please note that the price comparisons are based on search keywords - sometimes it might show cards with very similar names that are not exactly the same as the one chosen in the comparison. We do try to filter out the wrong results as best we can, though.

Specifications

Model	GeForce GTX 550 Ti	Radeon HD 6870
Manufacturer	nVidia	AMD
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 max amount of information (counted in MB per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in one second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core clock 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 processed in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the video card could possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.