GeForce 9400 GT 256MB vs Radeon HD 5550

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 5550, which comes with a core clock frequency of 550 MHz and a DDR2 memory speed of 400 MHz. It also features a 128-bit bus, and uses a 40 nm design. It is made up of 320(64x5) SPUs, 16 Texture Address Units, and 8 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Both cards have the exact same bandwidth, so in theory they should perform exactly the same. (explain)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5550 should be a lot (about 100%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the GeForce 9400 GT 256MB. (explain)

Radeon HD 5550		8800 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 9400 GT 256MB		4400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 4400 (100%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 5550 is the winner, by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 5550		4400 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 9400 GT 256MB		2200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 2200 (100%)

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 information (counted in MB per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR RAM, 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, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units 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 per 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 worked out by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.