GeForce 940M vs Radeon HD 5550

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 5550, which has GPU core speed of 550 MHz, and 512 MB of DDR2 memory set to run at 400 MHz through a 128-bit bus. It also is comprised of 320(64x5) SPUs, 16 TAUs, and 8 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the GeForce 940M should be quite a bit faster than the Radeon HD 5550 overall. (explain)

GeForce 940M		16000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5550		12800 MB/sec
	Difference: 3200 (25%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce 940M is quite a bit (more or less 192%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 5550. (explain)

GeForce 940M		25728 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5550		8800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 16928 (192%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce 940M should be quite a bit (more or less 95%) better at FSAA than the Radeon HD 5550, and will be capable of handling higher screen resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

GeForce 940M		8576 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5550		4400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 4176 (95%)

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 largest amount of data (in units of MB per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in one second. It's worked out by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR type memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If 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, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card could possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as 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 get to the maximum fill rate.