GeForce GTX 550 Ti vs Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB, which has core clock speeds of 625 MHz on the GPU, and 993 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR3 RAM. It features 800(160x5) SPUs as well as 40 Texture Address Units and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 550 Ti		116 Watts
Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB		250 Watts
	Difference: 134 Watts (116%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB should be 29% faster than the GeForce GTX 550 Ti overall, due to its higher data rate. (explain)

Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB		127104 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 550 Ti		98496 MB/sec
	Difference: 28608 (29%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB should be a lot (about 74%) faster with regards to AF than the GeForce GTX 550 Ti. (explain)

Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB		50000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 550 Ti		28800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 21200 (74%)

Pixel Rate

If using lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 550 Ti is superior to the Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB, not by a very large margin though. (explain)

GeForce GTX 550 Ti		21600 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB		20000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 1600 (8%)

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 maximum amount of information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in one second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR type memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the graphics card could possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.