GeForce GT 130 vs Radeon HD 5550

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 5550, which has a core clock frequency of 550 MHz and a DDR2 memory speed of 400 MHz. It also features a 128-bit memory bus, and uses a 40 nm design. It features 320(64x5) SPUs, 16 TAUs, and 8 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 5550 should be a small bit faster than the GeForce GT 130 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 5550		12800 MB/sec
GeForce GT 130		12000 MB/sec
	Difference: 800 (7%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GT 130 is much (about 36%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 5550. (explain)

GeForce GT 130		12000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5550		8800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 3200 (36%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high screen resolution is important to you, then the GeForce GT 130 is superior to the Radeon HD 5550, by a large margin. (explain)

GeForce GT 130		8000 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5550		4400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 3600 (82%)

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 maximum amount of data (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in one second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the graphics 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 most pixels that the graphics card can possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.