Radeon HD 5550 vs Radeon HD 7870

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 7870, which uses a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 1000 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM runs at a frequency of 1200 MHz on this particular model. It features 1280 SPUs as well as 80 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 7870 should theoretically perform a lot faster than the Radeon HD 5550 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870		153600 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5550		12800 MB/sec
	Difference: 140800 (1100%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7870 will be much (approximately 809%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 5550. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870		80000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5550		8800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 71200 (809%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 7870 is the winner, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870		32000 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5550		4400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 27600 (627%)

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 MB per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface within a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the better 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 are processed in one second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the 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 most pixels the graphics card can possibly write to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines 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 fill rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.