GeForce GT 130 vs Radeon HD 5550

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 5550, which features a clock speed of 550 MHz and a DDR2 memory frequency of 400 MHz. It also uses a 128-bit bus, and uses a 40 nm design. It features 320(64x5) SPUs, 16 TAUs, and 8 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 5550 should be just a bit faster than the GeForce GT 130 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 5550		12800 MB/sec
GeForce GT 130		12000 MB/sec
	Difference: 800 (7%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GT 130 will be much (about 36%) more effective at AF than the Radeon HD 5550. (explain)

GeForce GT 130		12000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5550		8800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 3200 (36%)

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the GeForce GT 130 is superior to the Radeon HD 5550, and very much so. (explain)

GeForce GT 130		8000 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5550		4400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 3600 (82%)

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 (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface in a second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the graphics 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 the graphics card can possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. 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 maximum fill rate.