GeForce GTX 280 vs Radeon RX 550

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon RX 550, which has a core clock frequency of 1100 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1750 MHz. It also features a 128-bit bus, and uses a 14 nm design. It features 512 SPUs, 32 Texture Address Units, and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon RX 550		50 Watts
GeForce GTX 280		236 Watts
	Difference: 186 Watts (372%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the GeForce GTX 280 should in theory be much better than the Radeon RX 550 in general. (explain)

GeForce GTX 280		141696 MB/sec
Radeon RX 550		114688 MB/sec
	Difference: 27008 (24%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 280 will be much (approximately 37%) faster with regards to AF than the Radeon RX 550. (explain)

GeForce GTX 280		48160 Mtexels/sec
Radeon RX 550		35200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 12960 (37%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high screen resolution is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 280 is the winner, but only just. (explain)

GeForce GTX 280		19264 Mpixels/sec
Radeon RX 550		17600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 1664 (9%)

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 largest amount of data (measured in MB per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in a second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This is calculated by multiplying the total number of 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 in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.