GeForce GTX 550 Ti vs Radeon HD 6790

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 6790, which uses a 40 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 840 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM runs at a frequency of 1050 MHz on this specific model. It features 800 SPUs along with 40 Texture Address Units and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Benchmarks

These are real-world performance benchmarks that were submitted by Hardware Compare users. The scores seen here are the average of all benchmarks submitted for each respective test and hardware.

3DMark Fire Strike Graphics Score

Radeon HD 6790		2150 points
GeForce GTX 550 Ti		1897 points
	Difference: 253 (13%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 550 Ti		116 Watts
Radeon HD 6790		150 Watts
	Difference: 34 Watts (29%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 6790 should be 36% faster than the GeForce GTX 550 Ti in general, because of its higher data rate. (explain)

Radeon HD 6790		134400 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 550 Ti		98496 MB/sec
	Difference: 35904 (36%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6790 is a small bit (about 17%) better at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTX 550 Ti. (explain)

Radeon HD 6790		33600 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 550 Ti		28800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 4800 (17%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 550 Ti is superior to the Radeon HD 6790, by a large margin. (explain)

GeForce GTX 550 Ti		21600 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 6790		13440 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 8160 (61%)

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 largest amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in one second. The number is worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the memory bandwidth, 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units 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 applied in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card could possibly write to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number 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 filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel fill rate also depends 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 max fill rate.