GeForce GTX 550 Ti vs Radeon HD 4870 X2

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 4870 X2, which comes with core speeds of 750 MHz on the GPU, and 900 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 800(160x5) SPUs along with 40 Texture Address Units and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 550 Ti		116 Watts
Radeon HD 4870 X2		350 Watts
	Difference: 234 Watts (202%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 4870 X2 should be 134% quicker than the GeForce GTX 550 Ti overall, due to its greater data rate. (explain)

Radeon HD 4870 X2		230400 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 550 Ti		98496 MB/sec
	Difference: 131904 (134%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 4870 X2 will be quite a bit (approximately 108%) better at AF than the GeForce GTX 550 Ti. (explain)

Radeon HD 4870 X2		60000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 550 Ti		28800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 31200 (108%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 4870 X2 is a better choice, but not by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 4870 X2		24000 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 550 Ti		21600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 2400 (11%)

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.

One or more cards in this comparison are multi-core. This means that their bandwidth, texel and pixel rates are theoretically doubled - this does not mean the card will actually perform twice as fast, but only that it should in theory be able to. Actual game benchmarks will give a more accurate idea of what it's capable of.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the largest amount of data (in units of MB per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in one second. It's worked out by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, 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 texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the 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 most pixels the video card could possibly record to the 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 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 output rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.