Radeon HD 4550 512MB vs Radeon R5 M230

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon R5 M230, which comes with a GPU core clock speed of 780 MHz, and 2048 MB of DDR3 memory running at 1000 MHz through a 64-bit bus. It also is made up of 320 SPUs, 20 Texture Address Units, and 4 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon R5 M230 should theoretically be much better than the Radeon HD 4550 512MB in general. (explain)

Radeon R5 M230		16000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4550 512MB		12800 MB/sec
	Difference: 3200 (25%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R5 M230 will be much (more or less 225%) better at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 4550 512MB. (explain)

Radeon R5 M230		15600 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4550 512MB		4800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 10800 (225%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R5 M230 should be a lot (approximately 30%) better at FSAA than the Radeon HD 4550 512MB, and able to handle higher screen resolutions more effectively. (explain)

Radeon R5 M230		3120 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4550 512MB		2400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 720 (30%)

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 maximum amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface within a second. It's calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better 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 most pixels the video card can possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of colour 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 rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.