Radeon HD 5550 vs Radeon R5 M255

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon R5 M255, which comes with core clock speeds of 940 MHz on the GPU, and 1000 MHz on the 2048 MB of DDR3 memory. It features 320 SPUs as well as 20 Texture Address Units and 8 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the Radeon R5 M255 should be much faster than the Radeon HD 5550 in general. (explain)

Radeon R5 M255		16000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5550		12800 MB/sec
	Difference: 3200 (25%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R5 M255 is a lot (approximately 114%) better at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 5550. (explain)

Radeon R5 M255		18800 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5550		8800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 10000 (114%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R5 M255 is a lot (about 71%) faster with regards to anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 5550, and capable of handling higher screen resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

Radeon R5 M255		7520 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5550		4400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 3120 (71%)

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 (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface in a second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are processed in one second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the video card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate also depends on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.