GeForce GTX 550 Ti vs Radeon HD 7950

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 7950, which comes with a core clock speed of 800 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1250 MHz. It also uses a 384-bit memory bus, and makes use of a 28 nm design. It is made up of 1792 SPUs, 112 TAUs, and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

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 7950		7731 points
GeForce GTX 550 Ti		1897 points
	Difference: 5834 (308%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 550 Ti		116 Watts
Radeon HD 7950		200 Watts
	Difference: 84 Watts (72%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 7950 should be quite a bit faster than the GeForce GTX 550 Ti in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 7950		240000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 550 Ti		98496 MB/sec
	Difference: 141504 (144%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7950 should be quite a bit (approximately 211%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTX 550 Ti. (explain)

Radeon HD 7950		89600 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 550 Ti		28800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 60800 (211%)

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 7950 is superior to the GeForce GTX 550 Ti, but only just. (explain)

Radeon HD 7950		25600 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 550 Ti		21600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 4000 (19%)

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 data (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the 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 number of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the video card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics card could possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core speed of the card. 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, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.