GeForce GTX 550 Ti vs Radeon HD 4850 512MB

Intro

The GeForce GTX 550 Ti makes use of a 40 nm design. nVidia has set the core frequency at 900 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM is set to run at a speed of 1026 MHz on this particular model. It features 192 SPUs along with 32 Texture Address Units and 24 Rasterization Operator Units.

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 4850 512MB, which features a core clock frequency of 625 MHz and a GDDR3 memory frequency of 993 MHz. It also features a 256-bit bus, and makes use of a 55 nm design. It is made up of 800(160x5) SPUs, 40 Texture Address Units, and 16 ROPs.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the largest amount of information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, 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 applied in one second. This is calculated by multiplying the total texture units by the core speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the video card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics card can 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 Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.