Radeon HD 4550 512MB vs Radeon R5 M230

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon R5 M230, which has a core clock speed of 780 MHz and a DDR3 memory speed of 1000 MHz. It also makes use of a 64-bit memory bus, and makes use of a 28 nm design. It 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

The Radeon R5 M230 should theoretically perform quite a bit faster 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 is quite a bit (more or less 225%) more effective at anisotropic 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 quite a bit (approximately 30%) better at FSAA than the Radeon HD 4550 512MB, and also will be able to handle higher screen resolutions without losing too much performance. (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 largest amount of information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface within a second. It is calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. 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 bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied in one second. This is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units 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 processed in one second.

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