GeForce GTX 460 1GB vs Radeon RX 550

Intro

The GeForce GTX 460 1GB makes use of a 40 nm design. nVidia has set the core frequency at 675 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM is set to run at a frequency of 900 MHz on this specific card. It features 336 SPUs along with 56 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Compare those specifications to the Radeon RX 550, which comes with a clock speed of 1100 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1750 MHz. It also uses a 128-bit memory bus, and makes use of a 14 nm design. It is comprised of 512 SPUs, 32 Texture Address Units, and 16 ROPs.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the maximum amount of data (counted in MB per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in one second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the video card can possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.