GeForce GTX 550 Ti vs Radeon HD 6870

Intro

The GeForce GTX 550 Ti uses a 40 nm design. nVidia has clocked the core speed at 900 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM runs at a speed of 1026 MHz on this specific model. It features 192 SPUs as well as 32 TAUs and 24 ROPs.

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 6870, which has a clock frequency of 900 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1050 MHz. It also makes use of a 256-bit bus, and uses a 40 nm design. It is made up of 1120 SPUs, 56 Texture Address Units, and 32 ROPs.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the largest amount of data (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface within a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This is calculated by multiplying the total texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the graphics card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip can possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.