GeForce GTX 980 vs Radeon HD 5550

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 5550, which comes with a GPU core clock speed of 550 MHz, and 512 MB of DDR2 memory running at 400 MHz through a 128-bit bus. It also is made up of 320(64x5) Stream Processors, 16 TAUs, and 8 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the GeForce GTX 980 should be a lot faster than the Radeon HD 5550 overall. (explain)

GeForce GTX 980		224000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5550		12800 MB/sec
	Difference: 211200 (1650%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 980 is a lot (approximately 1538%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 5550. (explain)

GeForce GTX 980		144128 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5550		8800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 135328 (1538%)

Pixel Rate

If running with lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 980 is a better choice, and very much so. (explain)

GeForce GTX 980		72064 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5550		4400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 67664 (1538%)

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 information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, the faster 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 are processed per second. This is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the video card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount 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 worked out by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel output rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.