GeForce GTX 550 Ti vs Radeon HD 4790

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 4790, which comes with core speeds of 600 MHz on the GPU, and 800 MHz on the 512 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 640(128x5) SPUs along with 32 TAUs and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon HD 4790 should in theory be a small bit superior to the GeForce GTX 550 Ti in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 4790		102400 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 550 Ti		98496 MB/sec
	Difference: 3904 (4%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 550 Ti should be a lot (more or less 50%) faster with regards to AF than the Radeon HD 4790. (explain)

GeForce GTX 550 Ti		28800 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4790		19200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 9600 (50%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high resolution is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 550 Ti is the winner, by far. (explain)

GeForce GTX 550 Ti		21600 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4790		9600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 12000 (125%)

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 (measured in MB per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card can possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the card's clock speed. 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 quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.