GeForce GTX 550 Ti vs Radeon HD 4870 X2

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 4870 X2, which comes with GPU clock speed of 750 MHz, and 1024 MB of GDDR5 memory running at 900 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also features 800(160x5) Stream Processors, 40 TAUs, and 16 ROPs.

(No game benchmarks for this combination yet.)

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

Theoretically, the Radeon HD 4870 X2 should be a lot faster than the GeForce GTX 550 Ti overall. (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 anisotropic filtering 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 using a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 4870 X2 is superior to the GeForce GTX 550 Ti, but only just. (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: Memory bandwidth is the max amount of information (in units of MB per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface in a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR 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 calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the 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 maximum number of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.