GeForce GTX 970M vs Radeon HD 4550 512MB

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 4550 512MB, which has a GPU core clock speed of 600 MHz, and 512 MB of GDDR3 memory running at 800 MHz through a 64-bit bus. It also is made up of 80(16x5) Stream Processors, 8 TAUs, and 4 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 4550 512MB		25 Watts
GeForce GTX 970M		75 Watts
	Difference: 50 Watts (200%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the GeForce GTX 970M should perform much faster than the Radeon HD 4550 512MB in general. (explain)

GeForce GTX 970M		96000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4550 512MB		12800 MB/sec
	Difference: 83200 (650%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 970M should be quite a bit (approximately 1440%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the Radeon HD 4550 512MB. (explain)

GeForce GTX 970M		73920 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4550 512MB		4800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 69120 (1440%)

Pixel Rate

If running with lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 970M is the winner, by far. (explain)

GeForce GTX 970M		44352 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4550 512MB		2400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 41952 (1748%)

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card can possibly write to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.