GeForce GTX 550 Ti vs Radeon HD 5970

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 5970, which has a core clock speed of 725 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1000 MHz. It also makes use of a 256-bit memory bus, and makes use of a 40 nm design. It is comprised of 1600 SPUs, 160 TAUs, and 64 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 550 Ti		116 Watts
Radeon HD 5970		294 Watts
	Difference: 178 Watts (153%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 5970 should be 160% faster than the GeForce GTX 550 Ti overall, because of its higher bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		256000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 550 Ti		98496 MB/sec
	Difference: 157504 (160%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5970 is much (approximately 706%) better at texture filtering than the GeForce GTX 550 Ti. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		232000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 550 Ti		28800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 203200 (706%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 5970 is superior to the GeForce GTX 550 Ti, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		92800 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 550 Ti		21600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 71200 (330%)

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: Bandwidth is the maximum amount of data (measured in MB per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in one second. It's worked out by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and high 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 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 processed in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the graphics card could possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.