GeForce GTX 550 Ti vs Radeon R9 285

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon R9 285, which has a GPU core clock speed of 918 MHz, and 2048 MB of GDDR5 RAM set to run at 1375 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is made up of 1792 SPUs, 112 Texture Address Units, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Benchmarks

These are real-world performance benchmarks that were submitted by Hardware Compare users. The scores seen here are the average of all benchmarks submitted for each respective test and hardware.

3DMark Fire Strike Graphics Score

Radeon R9 285		8500 points
GeForce GTX 550 Ti		1897 points
	Difference: 6603 (348%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 550 Ti		116 Watts
Radeon R9 285		190 Watts
	Difference: 74 Watts (64%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon R9 285 should in theory be much superior to the GeForce GTX 550 Ti overall. (explain)

Radeon R9 285		176000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 550 Ti		98496 MB/sec
	Difference: 77504 (79%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 285 will be a lot (about 257%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTX 550 Ti. (explain)

Radeon R9 285		102816 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 550 Ti		28800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 74016 (257%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R9 285 is a lot (about 36%) better at FSAA than the GeForce GTX 550 Ti, and also will be able to handle higher resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

Radeon R9 285		29376 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 550 Ti		21600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 7776 (36%)

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 (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface within a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better 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 applied in one second. This number 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 video card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip could possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel fill rate also depends on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.