GeForce 8500 GT vs Radeon HD 5550

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 5550, which comes with core clock speeds of 550 MHz on the GPU, and 400 MHz on the 512 MB of DDR2 RAM. 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

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

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5550 will be much (more or less 144%) better at texture filtering than the GeForce 8500 GT. (explain)

Radeon HD 5550		8800 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 8500 GT		3600 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 5200 (144%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 5550 is much (about 144%) more effective at AA than the GeForce 8500 GT, and will be capable of handling higher screen resolutions better. (explain)

Radeon HD 5550		4400 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 8500 GT		1800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 2600 (144%)

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 information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface within a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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

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