In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the Nvidia GeForce GT 730 v3 Gigabyte 2GB Edition are noticeably better than the AMD Radeon HD 8550D.

The Radeon HD 8550D has a 60 MHz higher core clock speed and 8 more Texture Mapping Units than the GT 730. This results in the Radeon HD 8550D providing 7 GTexel/s better texturing performance. 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 8550D has a 60 MHz higher core clock speed and 4 more Render Output Units than the GT 730. This results in the Radeon HD 8550D providing 3.3 GPixel/s better pixeling performance. However, both GPUs support DirectX 9 or above, and pixeling performance is only really relevant when comparing older cards.

The GT 730 was released less than a year after the Radeon HD 8550D, and so they are likely to have similar driver support for optimizing performance when running the latest games.

The GT 730 has 2048 MB video memory, but the Radeon HD 8550D does not have an entry, so the two GPUs cannot be reliably compared in this area.

The GeForce GT 730 v3 Gigabyte 2GB Edition has 96 Shader Processing Units and the Radeon HD 8550D has 256. However, the actual shader performance of the GT 730 is 134 and the actual shader performance of the Radeon HD 8550D is 108. The GT 730 having 26 better shader performance is not particularly notable, as altogether the Radeon HD 8550D performs better when taking into account other relevant data.

The GeForce GT 730 v3 Gigabyte 2GB Edition requires 49 Watts to run and the Radeon HD 8550D requires 65 Watts. We would recommend a PSU with at least 300 Watts for the GT 730 and a PSU with at least 450 Watts for the Radeon HD 8550D. The Radeon HD 8550D requires 16 Watts more than the GT 730 to run. The difference is not significant enough for the Radeon HD 8550D to have a noticeably larger impact on your yearly electricity bills than the GT 730.