GeForce GTX 550 Ti vs Radeon HD 4850 512MB

Intro

The GeForce GTX 550 Ti has a core clock frequency of 900 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1026 MHz. It also makes use of a 192-bit memory bus, and makes use of a 40 nm design. It is made up of 192 SPUs, 32 TAUs, and 24 Raster Operation Units.

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 4850 512MB, which has a GPU core clock speed of 625 MHz, and 512 MB of GDDR3 RAM running at 993 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is made up of 800(160x5) Stream Processors, 40 TAUs, and 16 ROPs.

Price Comparison

Please note that the price comparisons are based on search keywords, and might not be the exact same card listed on this page. We have no control over the accuracy of their search results.

GeForce GTX 550 Ti Amazon.com Other US-based stores Amazon.co.uk Amazon.de Amazon.fr

Radeon HD 4850 512MB Amazon.com Other US-based stores Amazon.co.uk Amazon.de Amazon.fr

Specifications

Model	GeForce GTX 550 Ti	Radeon HD 4850 512MB
Manufacturer	nVidia	ATi
Year	March 2011	Jun 25, 2008
Code Name	GF116	RV770 PRO
Fab Process	40 nm	55 nm
Bus	PCIe 2.1 x16	PCIe 2.0 x16
Memory	1024 MB	512 MB
Core Speed	900 MHz	625 MHz
Shader Speed	1800 MHz	(N/A) MHz
Memory Speed	1026 MHz (4104 MHz effective)	993 MHz (1986 MHz effective)
Unified Shaders	192	800(160x5)
Texture Mapping Units	32	40
Render Output Units	24	16
Bus Type	GDDR5	GDDR3
Bus Width	192-bit	256-bit
DirectX Version	DirectX 11	DirectX 10.1
OpenGL Version	OpenGL 4.1	OpenGL 3.0
Power (Max TDP)	116 watts	110 watts
Shader Model	5.0	4.1
Bandwidth	98496 MB/sec	63552 MB/sec
Texel Rate	28800 Mtexels/sec	25000 Mtexels/sec
Pixel Rate	21600 Mpixels/sec	10000 Mpixels/sec

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the largest amount of data (in units of MB per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface within a second. It's worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR type memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs 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 fill rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.