GeForce 9500 GT DDR2 vs Radeon HD 5550

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 5550, which uses a 40 nm design. AMD has set the core speed at 550 MHz. The DDR2 memory runs at a speed of 400 MHz on this specific model. It features 320(64x5) SPUs along with 16 Texture Address Units and 8 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the GeForce 9500 GT DDR2 should be 25% quicker than the Radeon HD 5550 in general, due to its higher data rate. (explain)

GeForce 9500 GT DDR2		16000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5550		12800 MB/sec
	Difference: 3200 (25%)

Texel Rate

Both cards have exactly the same texel fill rate, so in theory they should be equally good at at AF. (explain)

Pixel Rate

Both cards have exactly the same pixel rate, so theoretically they should perform equally good at at AA, and be able to handle the same screen resolutions. (explain)

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 (in units of MB per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in one second. The number is calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip could possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.