Radeon HD 5550 vs Radeon R7 250

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon R7 250, which uses a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 1000 MHz. The GDDR5 memory works at a frequency of 1150 MHz on this particular model. It features 384 SPUs as well as 24 TAUs and 8 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon R7 250 should perform much faster than the Radeon HD 5550 in general. (explain)

Radeon R7 250		73600 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5550		12800 MB/sec
	Difference: 60800 (475%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R7 250 should be much (about 173%) faster with regards to AF than the Radeon HD 5550. (explain)

Radeon R7 250		24000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5550		8800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 15200 (173%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R7 250 is a lot (more or less 82%) better at AA than the Radeon HD 5550, and will be able to handle higher screen resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

Radeon R7 250		8000 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5550		4400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 3600 (82%)

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: Memory bandwidth is the max amount of data (measured in MB per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card can possibly write to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.