GeForce 9600 GSO ASUS 512 vs Radeon HD 4550 512MB

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 4550 512MB, which comes with core clock speeds of 600 MHz on the GPU, and 800 MHz on the 512 MB of GDDR3 memory. It features 80(16x5) SPUs along with 8 Texture Address Units and 4 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 4550 512MB		25 Watts
GeForce 9600 GSO ASUS 512		84 Watts
	Difference: 59 Watts (236%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the GeForce 9600 GSO ASUS 512 will be 25% quicker than the Radeon HD 4550 512MB overall, because of its higher bandwidth. (explain)

GeForce 9600 GSO ASUS 512		16000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4550 512MB		12800 MB/sec
	Difference: 3200 (25%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce 9600 GSO ASUS 512 should be much (approximately 450%) more effective at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 4550 512MB. (explain)

GeForce 9600 GSO ASUS 512		26400 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4550 512MB		4800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 21600 (450%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce 9600 GSO ASUS 512 will be much (about 175%) faster with regards to FSAA than the Radeon HD 4550 512MB, and will be capable of handling higher resolutions better. (explain)

GeForce 9600 GSO ASUS 512		6600 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4550 512MB		2400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 4200 (175%)

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 moved past the external memory interface in a second. It's worked out by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core 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 in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.