GeForce GTX 550 Ti vs Radeon HD 5550

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 5550, which uses a 40 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 550 MHz. The DDR2 memory works at a frequency of 400 MHz on this particular card. It features 320(64x5) SPUs along with 16 Texture Address Units and 8 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

The GeForce GTX 550 Ti, in theory, should be much faster than the Radeon HD 5550 overall. (explain)

GeForce GTX 550 Ti		98496 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5550		12800 MB/sec
	Difference: 85696 (670%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 550 Ti should be quite a bit (more or less 227%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 5550. (explain)

GeForce GTX 550 Ti		28800 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5550		8800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 20000 (227%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 550 Ti is quite a bit (approximately 391%) better at full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 5550, and will be able to handle higher screen resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

GeForce GTX 550 Ti		21600 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5550		4400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 17200 (391%)

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.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the max amount of data (in units of MB per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface within a second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This figure 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 graphics 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 most pixels the video card could possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.