GeForce GTX 550 Ti vs Radeon R9 M270X

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon R9 M270X, which has clock speeds of 725 MHz on the GPU, and 1125 MHz on the 2048 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 640 SPUs as well as 40 Texture Address Units and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the GeForce GTX 550 Ti should be 37% quicker than the Radeon R9 M270X in general, due to its greater data rate. (explain)

GeForce GTX 550 Ti		98496 MB/sec
Radeon R9 M270X		72000 MB/sec
	Difference: 26496 (37%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 M270X will be just a bit (about 1%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTX 550 Ti. (explain)

Radeon R9 M270X		29000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 550 Ti		28800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 200 (1%)

Pixel Rate

If using lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 550 Ti is a better choice, by far. (explain)

GeForce GTX 550 Ti		21600 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 M270X		11600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 10000 (86%)

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 maximum amount of information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in one second. The number is worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, 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 number of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the 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 the video card could possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.