GeForce GTX 550 Ti vs Radeon HD 5850

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 5850, which comes with a GPU core clock speed of 725 MHz, and 1024 MB of GDDR5 RAM set to run at 1000 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is comprised of 1440(288x5) SPUs, 72 TAUs, and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 550 Ti		116 Watts
Radeon HD 5850		151 Watts
	Difference: 35 Watts (30%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon HD 5850 should in theory be much superior to the GeForce GTX 550 Ti overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 5850		128000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 550 Ti		98496 MB/sec
	Difference: 29504 (30%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5850 should be a lot (approximately 81%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the GeForce GTX 550 Ti. (explain)

Radeon HD 5850		52200 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 550 Ti		28800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 23400 (81%)

Pixel Rate

If running with lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon HD 5850 is a better choice, but not by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 5850		23200 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 550 Ti		21600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 1600 (7%)

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 largest amount of data (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface within a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics card can possibly write to the local memory in one 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 - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.