Radeon HD 5550 vs Radeon HD 7970

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 7970, which comes with core clock speeds of 925 MHz on the GPU, and 1375 MHz on the 3072 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 2048 SPUs along with 128 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon HD 7970 should theoretically be a lot superior to the Radeon HD 5550 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		264000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5550		12800 MB/sec
	Difference: 251200 (1963%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7970 should be much (more or less 1245%) more effective at AF than the Radeon HD 5550. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		118400 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5550		8800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 109600 (1245%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 7970 should be quite a bit (more or less 573%) more effective at FSAA than the Radeon HD 5550, and will be able to handle higher resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		29600 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5550		4400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 25200 (573%)

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 moved across the external memory interface in a second. It is calculated by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the video card can possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.