Radeon HD 5550 vs Radeon R7 260X

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon R7 260X, which uses a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 1100 MHz. The GDDR5 memory works at a speed of 1625 MHz on this model. It features 896 SPUs as well as 56 TAUs and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon R7 260X should perform much faster than the Radeon HD 5550 overall. (explain)

Radeon R7 260X		104000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5550		12800 MB/sec
	Difference: 91200 (713%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R7 260X will be quite a bit (more or less 600%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 5550. (explain)

Radeon R7 260X		61600 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5550		8800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 52800 (600%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R7 260X should be much (more or less 300%) more effective at FSAA than the Radeon HD 5550, and should be capable of handling higher screen resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

Radeon R7 260X		17600 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5550		4400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 13200 (300%)

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 data (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in one second. The number is worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the graphics card can possibly record to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.