Radeon R5 M255 vs Radeon R9 380 4G

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon R9 380 4G, which comes with core clock speeds of 970 MHz on the GPU, and 1425 MHz on the 4096 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 1792 SPUs along with 112 TAUs and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon R9 380 4G should be 1040% faster than the Radeon R5 M255 in general, due to its greater bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon R9 380 4G		182400 MB/sec
Radeon R5 M255		16000 MB/sec
	Difference: 166400 (1040%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 380 4G will be quite a bit (about 478%) more effective at texture filtering than the Radeon R5 M255. (explain)

Radeon R9 380 4G		108640 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R5 M255		18800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 89840 (478%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon R9 380 4G is the winner, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon R9 380 4G		31040 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R5 M255		7520 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 23520 (313%)

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 maximum amount of data (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface within a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This is worked out by multiplying the total texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the graphics card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card can possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount 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 output rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.