Radeon HD 5550 vs Radeon HD 6790

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 6790, which makes use of 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 card. It features 800 SPUs as well as 40 Texture Address Units and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon HD 6790 should theoretically be much better than the Radeon HD 5550 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 6790		134400 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5550		12800 MB/sec
	Difference: 121600 (950%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6790 should be much (more or less 282%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the Radeon HD 5550. (explain)

Radeon HD 6790		33600 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5550		8800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 24800 (282%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 6790 will be quite a bit (more or less 205%) better at full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 5550, and capable of handling higher screen resolutions better. (explain)

Radeon HD 6790		13440 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5550		4400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 9040 (205%)

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 largest amount of data (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in one second. It is calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip can possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.