GeForce GT 210 vs Radeon HD 5550

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 5550, which comes with a GPU core clock speed of 550 MHz, and 512 MB of DDR2 RAM running at 400 MHz through a 128-bit bus. It also features 320(64x5) SPUs, 16 Texture Address Units, and 8 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Both cards have the exact same memory bandwidth, so in theory they should have identical performance. (explain)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5550 is a lot (about 87%) more effective at texture filtering than the GeForce GT 210. (explain)

Radeon HD 5550		8800 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GT 210		4712 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 4088 (87%)

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 5550 is superior to the GeForce GT 210, by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 5550		4400 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GT 210		2356 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 2044 (87%)

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 largest amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface within a second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the bandwidth is, 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 are applied in one second. This is calculated by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the graphics card could possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of ROPs by the clock 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 is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.