GeForce GTX 550 Ti vs Radeon HD 6970

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 6970, which makes use of a 40 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 880 MHz. The GDDR5 memory works at a speed of 1375 MHz on this card. It features 1536 SPUs along with 96 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

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 6970		3470 points
GeForce GTX 550 Ti		1897 points
	Difference: 1573 (83%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 550 Ti		116 Watts
Radeon HD 6970		250 Watts
	Difference: 134 Watts (116%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon HD 6970 should theoretically be much superior to the GeForce GTX 550 Ti in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		176000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 550 Ti		98496 MB/sec
	Difference: 77504 (79%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6970 will be quite a bit (more or less 193%) more effective at texture filtering than the GeForce GTX 550 Ti. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		84480 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 550 Ti		28800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 55680 (193%)

Pixel Rate

If using lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6970 is the winner, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		28160 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 550 Ti		21600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 6560 (30%)

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 information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface in one second. It's calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the graphics card can possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the card's 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 also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.