GeForce GTX 550 Ti vs Radeon HD 4890 2GB

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 4890 2GB, which comes with core clock speeds of 1000 MHz on the GPU, and 975 MHz on the 2048 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 800(160x5) SPUs along with 40 Texture Address Units and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 550 Ti		116 Watts
Radeon HD 4890 2GB		190 Watts
	Difference: 74 Watts (64%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 4890 2GB should theoretically perform much faster than the GeForce GTX 550 Ti in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 4890 2GB		124800 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 550 Ti		98496 MB/sec
	Difference: 26304 (27%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 4890 2GB will be a lot (approximately 39%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTX 550 Ti. (explain)

Radeon HD 4890 2GB		40000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 550 Ti		28800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 11200 (39%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 550 Ti is superior to the Radeon HD 4890 2GB, by a large margin. (explain)

GeForce GTX 550 Ti		21600 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4890 2GB		16000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 5600 (35%)

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 information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface within a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, 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 number of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed in one 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 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 amount of pixels the video card could possibly write to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.