In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the AMD Radeon HD 5550 512MB are marginally better than the Nvidia GeForce GT 730 v3 Gigabyte 2GB Edition.

The GT 730 has a 150 MHz higher core clock speed and the same number of Texture Mapping Units as the HD 5550. This results in the GT 730 providing 2.4 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 GT 730 has a 150 MHz higher core clock speed than the HD 5550, but the HD 5550 has 4 more Render Output Units than the GT 730. As a result, the HD 5550 exhibits a 1.6 GPixel/s better Pixel Fill Rate than the GT 730. However, both GPUs support DirectX 9 or above, and pixeling performance is only really relevant when comparing older cards.

The GT 730 was released over three years more recently than the HD 5550, and so the GT 730 is likely to have far better driver support, meaning it will be much more optimized and ultimately superior to the HD 5550 when running the latest games.

The GT 730 has 1536 MB more video memory than the HD 5550, so is likely to be much better at displaying game textures at higher resolutions. However, overall, the HD 5550 has superior memory performance.

The HD 5550 has 35.2 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the GT 730, which means that the memory performance of the HD 5550 is noticeably better than the GT 730.

The GeForce GT 730 v3 Gigabyte 2GB Edition has 96 Shader Processing Units and the Radeon HD 5550 512MB has 320. However, the actual shader performance of the GT 730 is 134 and the actual shader performance of the HD 5550 is 114. The GT 730 having 20 better shader performance is not particularly notable, as altogether the HD 5550 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 5550 512MB requires 39 Watts. We would recommend a PSU with at least 300 Watts for the GT 730 and a PSU with at least 400 Watts for the HD 5550. The GT 730 requires 10 Watts more than the HD 5550 to run. The difference is not significant enough for the GT 730 to have a noticeably larger impact on your yearly electricity bills than the HD 5550.