GeForce GTX 460 (OEM) vs Radeon HD 5550

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 5550, which has a clock speed of 550 MHz and a DDR2 memory speed of 400 MHz. It also makes use of a 128-bit bus, and uses a 40 nm design. It is made up of 320(64x5) SPUs, 16 Texture Address Units, and 8 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the GeForce GTX 460 (OEM) should perform much faster than the Radeon HD 5550 overall. (explain)

GeForce GTX 460 (OEM)		108800 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5550		12800 MB/sec
	Difference: 96000 (750%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 460 (OEM) is a lot (more or less 314%) more effective at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 5550. (explain)

GeForce GTX 460 (OEM)		36400 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5550		8800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 27600 (314%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 460 (OEM) will be much (approximately 373%) more effective at anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 5550, and also should be capable of handling higher screen resolutions better. (explain)

GeForce GTX 460 (OEM)		20800 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5550		4400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 16400 (373%)

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 max amount of data (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface in one second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be processed 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 video card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the graphics card can possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.