GeForce GT 310 vs Radeon HD 5550

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 5550, which features core clock speeds of 550 MHz on the GPU, and 400 MHz on the 512 MB of DDR2 RAM. It features 320(64x5) SPUs as well as 16 Texture Address Units and 8 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the GeForce GT 310 is 25% faster than the Radeon HD 5550 overall, because of its higher bandwidth. (explain)

GeForce GT 310		16000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5550		12800 MB/sec
	Difference: 3200 (25%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5550 is much (approximately 87%) better at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GT 310. (explain)

Radeon HD 5550		8800 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GT 310		4712 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 4088 (87%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 5550 should be quite a bit (more or less 87%) more effective at full screen anti-aliasing than the GeForce GT 310, and should be able to handle higher resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

Radeon HD 5550		4400 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GT 310		2356 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 2044 (87%)

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: Memory bandwidth is the largest amount of data (counted in megabytes per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in one second. It's calculated by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, the faster 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 processed per second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total texture units of the card 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 per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics card could possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core 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 fill rate also depends on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.