Radeon HD 5550 vs Radeon R9 M280X

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon R9 M280X, which comes with a core clock frequency of 900 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1375 MHz. It also features a 128-bit memory bus, and makes use of a 28 nm design. It is made up of 896 SPUs, 56 Texture Address Units, and 16 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the Radeon R9 M280X should perform much faster than the Radeon HD 5550 overall. (explain)

Radeon R9 M280X		88000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5550		12800 MB/sec
	Difference: 75200 (588%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 M280X will be quite a bit (more or less 473%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 5550. (explain)

Radeon R9 M280X		50400 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5550		8800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 41600 (473%)

Pixel Rate

If running with lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon R9 M280X is a better choice, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon R9 M280X		14400 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5550		4400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 10000 (227%)

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 max amount of data (measured in MB per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in one second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, 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 can be processed in one second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher 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 per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.