GeForce GTX 650 vs Radeon HD 5550

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 5550, which uses a 40 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 550 MHz. The DDR2 memory is set to run at a speed of 400 MHz on this model. It features 320(64x5) SPUs along with 16 Texture Address Units and 8 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

The GeForce GTX 650 should in theory perform much faster than the Radeon HD 5550 in general. (explain)

GeForce GTX 650		80000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5550		12800 MB/sec
	Difference: 67200 (525%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 650 is much (about 285%) better at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 5550. (explain)

GeForce GTX 650		33856 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5550		8800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 25056 (285%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 650 will be much (about 285%) faster with regards to AA than the Radeon HD 5550, and also able to handle higher resolutions better. (explain)

GeForce GTX 650		16928 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5550		4400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 12528 (285%)

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 maximum amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transferred over 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 type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The better 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 amount of pixels that the graphics card can possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.