GeForce GTX 550 Ti vs Radeon HD 4550 256MB

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 4550 256MB, which features clock speeds of 600 MHz on the GPU, and 800 MHz on the 256 MB of DDR3 RAM. It features 80(16x5) SPUs along with 8 TAUs and 4 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 4550 256MB		25 Watts
GeForce GTX 550 Ti		116 Watts
	Difference: 91 Watts (364%)

Memory Bandwidth

The GeForce GTX 550 Ti should in theory be much faster than the Radeon HD 4550 256MB overall. (explain)

GeForce GTX 550 Ti		98496 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4550 256MB		12800 MB/sec
	Difference: 85696 (670%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 550 Ti is quite a bit (approximately 500%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 4550 256MB. (explain)

GeForce GTX 550 Ti		28800 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4550 256MB		4800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 24000 (500%)

Pixel Rate

If using lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 550 Ti is a better choice, by far. (explain)

GeForce GTX 550 Ti		21600 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4550 256MB		2400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 19200 (800%)

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 in one second. It's worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This is worked out by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, 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 maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip can possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core clock speed. 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, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.