GeForce GT 130 vs Radeon HD 5550

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 5550, which comes with a GPU core clock speed of 550 MHz, and 512 MB of DDR2 memory set to run at 400 MHz through a 128-bit bus. It also features 320(64x5) Stream Processors, 16 Texture Address Units, and 8 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 5550 should theoretically be a little bit faster than the GeForce GT 130 in general. (explain)

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

Texel Rate

The GeForce GT 130 should be a lot (about 36%) better 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 using a high resolution is important to you, then the GeForce GT 130 is the winner, by far. (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 largest amount of data (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in a second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be processed in one second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the graphics card can 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 colour ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel fill rate also depends on many 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.