GeForce 8800 Ultra vs Radeon RX 550

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon RX 550, which comes with clock speeds of 1100 MHz on the GPU, and 1750 MHz on the 2048 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 512 SPUs as well as 32 TAUs and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon RX 550		50 Watts
GeForce 8800 Ultra		171 Watts
	Difference: 121 Watts (242%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the Radeon RX 550 should be just a bit faster than the GeForce 8800 Ultra overall. (explain)

Radeon RX 550		114688 MB/sec
GeForce 8800 Ultra		103680 MB/sec
	Difference: 11008 (11%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce 8800 Ultra is a small bit (about 11%) more effective at AF than the Radeon RX 550. (explain)

GeForce 8800 Ultra		39168 Mtexels/sec
Radeon RX 550		35200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 3968 (11%)

Pixel Rate

If using lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon RX 550 is the winner, not by a very large margin though. (explain)

Radeon RX 550		17600 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 8800 Ultra		14688 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 2912 (20%)

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 data (counted in MB per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface within a second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's memory bandwidth, 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 texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the graphics card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card can possibly record 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 the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.