Radeon HD 4550 256MB vs Radeon R7 250X 2GB

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon R7 250X 2GB, which comes with a clock speed of 1000 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1125 MHz. It also uses a 128-bit bus, and makes use of a 28 nm design. It features 640 SPUs, 40 Texture Address Units, and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 4550 256MB		25 Watts
Radeon R7 250X 2GB		95 Watts
	Difference: 70 Watts (280%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the Radeon R7 250X 2GB should perform quite a bit faster than the Radeon HD 4550 256MB in general. (explain)

Radeon R7 250X 2GB		72000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4550 256MB		12800 MB/sec
	Difference: 59200 (463%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R7 250X 2GB will be quite a bit (approximately 733%) more effective at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 4550 256MB. (explain)

Radeon R7 250X 2GB		40000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4550 256MB		4800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 35200 (733%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon R7 250X 2GB is superior to the Radeon HD 4550 256MB, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon R7 250X 2GB		16000 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4550 256MB		2400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 13600 (567%)

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 largest amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface within a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are processed in one second. This is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core 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 that the graphics card could possibly record to the 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 card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.