GeForce GTX 970M vs Radeon HD 5550

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 5550, which has core clock speeds of 550 MHz on the GPU, and 400 MHz on the 512 MB of DDR2 memory. It features 320(64x5) SPUs as well as 16 Texture Address Units and 8 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the GeForce GTX 970M should in theory be a lot better than the Radeon HD 5550 overall. (explain)

GeForce GTX 970M		96000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5550		12800 MB/sec
	Difference: 83200 (650%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 970M should be quite a bit (approximately 740%) better at AF than the Radeon HD 5550. (explain)

GeForce GTX 970M		73920 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5550		8800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 65120 (740%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 970M will be quite a bit (approximately 908%) more effective at full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 5550, and also should be capable of handling higher screen resolutions while still performing well. (explain)

GeForce GTX 970M		44352 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5550		4400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 39952 (908%)

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 MB per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface within a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the 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 can be processed in one second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the video card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the graphics card could possibly write to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.