GeForce GTX 550 Ti vs Radeon HD 4550 512MB

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 4550 512MB, which comes with core clock speeds of 600 MHz on the GPU, and 800 MHz on the 512 MB of GDDR3 memory. It features 80(16x5) SPUs as well as 8 TAUs and 4 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 4550 512MB		25 Watts
GeForce GTX 550 Ti		116 Watts
	Difference: 91 Watts (364%)

Memory Bandwidth

The GeForce GTX 550 Ti should theoretically perform much faster than the Radeon HD 4550 512MB in general. (explain)

GeForce GTX 550 Ti		98496 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4550 512MB		12800 MB/sec
	Difference: 85696 (670%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 550 Ti is quite a bit (approximately 500%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 4550 512MB. (explain)

GeForce GTX 550 Ti		28800 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4550 512MB		4800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 24000 (500%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 550 Ti is a lot (approximately 800%) faster with regards to full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 4550 512MB, and will be able to handle higher resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

GeForce GTX 550 Ti		21600 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4550 512MB		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: Bandwidth is the max amount of information (counted in MB per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in one second. The number is calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of 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 number of ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.