GeForce GTX 550 Ti vs Radeon HD 4850 2GB

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 4850 2GB, which comes with core speeds of 625 MHz on the GPU, and 993 MHz on the 2048 MB of GDDR4 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)

Radeon HD 4850 2GB		110 Watts
GeForce GTX 550 Ti		116 Watts
	Difference: 6 Watts (5%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the GeForce GTX 550 Ti should perform a lot faster than the Radeon HD 4850 2GB overall. (explain)

GeForce GTX 550 Ti		98496 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4850 2GB		63552 MB/sec
	Difference: 34944 (55%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 550 Ti is a little bit (approximately 15%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 4850 2GB. (explain)

GeForce GTX 550 Ti		28800 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4850 2GB		25000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 3800 (15%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high screen resolution is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 550 Ti is a better choice, and very much so. (explain)

GeForce GTX 550 Ti		21600 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4850 2GB		10000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 11600 (116%)

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 maximum amount of data (counted in MB per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in one second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This number is worked out 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 card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the graphics card could possibly write to the 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 clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate is also dependant on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.