GeForce GTX 550 Ti vs Radeon HD 6870

Intro

The GeForce GTX 550 Ti comes with a GPU clock speed of 900 MHz, and the 1024 MB of GDDR5 memory runs at 1026 MHz through a 192-bit bus. It also is made up of 192 Stream Processors, 32 TAUs, and 24 Raster Operation Units.

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 6870, which comes with 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.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the largest amount of data (measured in megabytes per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in a second. It is worked out by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed in one second. This is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the video card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the video card could possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on quite a few 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.