GeForce GTX 550 Ti vs Radeon HD 6990

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 6990, which comes with a core clock speed of 830 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1250 MHz. It also makes use of a 256-bit bus, and makes use of a 40 nm design. It is made up of 1536 SPUs, 96 Texture Address Units, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Benchmarks

These are real-world performance benchmarks that were submitted by Hardware Compare users. The scores seen here are the average of all benchmarks submitted for each respective test and hardware.

3DMark Fire Strike Graphics Score

Radeon HD 6990		5820 points
GeForce GTX 550 Ti		1897 points
	Difference: 3923 (207%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 550 Ti		116 Watts
Radeon HD 6990		375 Watts
	Difference: 259 Watts (223%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 6990 will be 225% faster than the GeForce GTX 550 Ti in general, because of its higher bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon HD 6990		320000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 550 Ti		98496 MB/sec
	Difference: 221504 (225%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6990 will be a lot (approximately 453%) better at AF than the GeForce GTX 550 Ti. (explain)

Radeon HD 6990		159360 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 550 Ti		28800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 130560 (453%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 6990 is much (approximately 146%) faster with regards to FSAA than the GeForce GTX 550 Ti, and also should be able to handle higher resolutions better. (explain)

Radeon HD 6990		53120 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 550 Ti		21600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 31520 (146%)

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.

One or more cards in this comparison are multi-core. This means that their bandwidth, texel and pixel rates are theoretically doubled - this does not mean the card will actually perform twice as fast, but only that it should in theory be able to. Actual game benchmarks will give a more accurate idea of what it's capable of.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the largest amount of data (in units of MB per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface in a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the graphics card could possibly write to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the clock speed of the card. 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 is also dependant on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.