Nvidia 6800 gt vs radeon hd 5550. Which is better?

[ezrashanti]

Hello, having a bit of trouble figuring this out.
Which card will be faster:

nvidia 6800 gt (256mb) or radeon 5550 (1gb ddr2).
I am looking to play Starcraft 2 and I have both of these cards, just wondering which will be better to use.

Thanks,
Ezra

 

[gamerx456]

The 5550. That's just a given. The more amount of VRAM the better graphics the card will produce. Starcraft mainly draws on processor power, and the GPU isn't as important. The amount of fps you get will heavily rely on processing power.

 

[ezrashanti]

I was also wondering, if I had say a 5550 that was 1gb ddr2 and one with 1gb ddr3, would the one with ddr3 perform 1.5x as well? Does it essentially have 1.5x the memory?

 

[ezrashanti]

And also, I know I'm straying a bit on the topic, but will using windows 7 64bit with my 64bit cpu give me a significant speed boost over w7 32bit? I use the pc for starcraft 2 and also for music production. Those are the most intensive things I do.

 

[gamerx456]

Nope. The difference in performance is negligible.

 

[gamerx456]

That last reply I made was in regards to the DDR2 and DDR3 question not the windows 7.

 

[gamerx456]

Windows 7 64 bit handles large amounts of RAM more efficiently than 32 bit. That's the main difference. So no, it will not give you SIGNIFICANT differences.

 

[4745454b]

I was also wondering, if I had say a 5550 that was 1gb ddr2 and one with 1gb ddr3, would the one with ddr3 perform 1.5x as well? Does it essentially have 1.5x the memory?

1GB of memory is 1GB of memory. The issue is that one gig card uses slow DDR2 instead of DDR3. While it has 1GB just like any other one gig card (and 4x as much as your 256MB 6800GT) it doesn't have as much memory bandwidth. This means loading data into memory will take longer then a DDR3 or 5 card.

The reason this matters is that even if chip X is faster then chip Y, if you pair it with slower memory it will spend clock cycles waiting for info from the RAM and it could provide lower frame rates. The other thing you need to worry about is the resolution, as 256MBs isn't enough ram for much of anything above 1440x900.

The 6800GT is probably around the speed of the 9400GT or so. I believe the 5550 is faster then that. The only question then becomes how much does that DDR2 slow it down by? Seeing as you have both cards, throw some games at both and tell us which is faster.

 

[reprotected]

As you see here: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/best-gaming-graphics-card-geforce-gtx-590-radeon-hd-6990,2879-7.html

The 6800 GT is much much slower than the HD5550. The 6800 GT is DX9, the HD5550 is DX11 for extra information.