GeForce GT 320 vs Radeon HD 5550

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 5550, which has core speeds of 550 MHz on the GPU, and 400 MHz on the 512 MB of DDR2 memory. It features 320(64x5) SPUs along with 16 Texture Address Units and 8 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

The GeForce GT 320 should theoretically perform quite a bit faster than the Radeon HD 5550 in general. (explain)

GeForce GT 320		25280 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5550		12800 MB/sec
	Difference: 12480 (98%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GT 320 is a lot (about 47%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 5550. (explain)

GeForce GT 320		12960 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5550		8800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 4160 (47%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 5550 is superior to the GeForce GT 320, not by a very large margin though. (explain)

Radeon HD 5550		4400 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GT 320		4320 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 80 (2%)

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 maximum amount of information (in units of MB per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface in one second. It's calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR 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 anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics card could possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the core 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 output rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.