Radeon HD 5550 vs Radeon HD 7850

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 7850, which features a clock frequency of 860 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1200 MHz. It also makes use of a 256-bit memory bus, and uses a 28 nm design. It is comprised of 1024 SPUs, 64 Texture Address Units, and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon HD 7850 should theoretically be much superior to the Radeon HD 5550 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 7850		153600 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5550		12800 MB/sec
	Difference: 140800 (1100%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7850 is much (about 525%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the Radeon HD 5550. (explain)

Radeon HD 7850		55040 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5550		8800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 46240 (525%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 7850 is superior to the Radeon HD 5550, by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 7850		27520 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5550		4400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 23120 (525%)

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 max amount of information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in one second. It is calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip could possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.