In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the Nvidia GeForce 8600 GT 512MB GDDR3 are significantly better than the AMD Radeon HD 4550.

The Radeon HD 4550 has a 60 MHz higher core clock speed than the 8600 GT, but the 8600 GT has 8 more Texture Mapping Units than the Radeon HD 4550. As a result, the 8600 GT exhibits a 3.8 GTexel/s better Texture Fill Rate than the Radeon HD 4550. This still holds weight but shader performance is generally more relevant, particularly since both of these GPUs support at least DirectX 10.

The Radeon HD 4550 has a 60 MHz higher core clock speed than the 8600 GT, but the 8600 GT has 4 more Render Output Units than the Radeon HD 4550. As a result, the 8600 GT exhibits a 1.9 GPixel/s better Pixel Fill Rate than the Radeon HD 4550. However, both GPUs support DirectX 9 or above, and pixeling performance is only really relevant when comparing older cards.

The Radeon HD 4550 was released over a year more recently than the 8600 GT, and so the Radeon HD 4550 is likely to have better driver support, meaning it will be more optimized for running the latest games when compared to the 8600 GT.

The 8600 GT has 256 MB more video memory than the Radeon HD 4550, so is likely to be slightly better at displaying game textures at higher resolutions. This is supported by the fact that the 8600 GT also has superior memory performance overall.

The 8600 GT has 9.6 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the Radeon HD 4550, which means that the memory performance of the 8600 GT is marginally better than the Radeon HD 4550.

The GeForce 8600 GT 512MB GDDR3 has 32 Shader Processing Units and the Radeon HD 4550 has 80. However, the actual shader performance of the 8600 GT is 43 and the actual shader performance of the Radeon HD 4550 is 34. The 8600 GT having 9 better shader performance and an altogether better performance when taking into account other relevant data means that the 8600 GT delivers a marginally smoother and more efficient experience when processing graphical data than the Radeon HD 4550.

The Radeon HD 4550 transistor size technology is 25 nm (nanometers) smaller than the 8600 GT. This means that the Radeon HD 4550 is expected to run slightly cooler and achieve higher clock frequencies than the 8600 GT.

The GeForce 8600 GT 512MB GDDR3 requires 46 Watts to run and the Radeon HD 4550 requires 25 Watts. We would recommend a PSU with at least 350 Watts for the 8600 GT and a PSU with at least 300 Watts for the Radeon HD 4550. The 8600 GT requires 21 Watts more than the Radeon HD 4550 to run. The difference is not significant enough for the 8600 GT to have a noticeably larger impact on your yearly electricity bills than the Radeon HD 4550.