Radeon HD 4550 256MB vs Radeon R9 M280X

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon R9 M280X, which features GPU clock speed of 900 MHz, and 4096 MB of GDDR5 memory set to run at 1375 MHz through a 128-bit bus. It also is made up of 896 SPUs, 56 Texture Address Units, and 16 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 4550 256MB		25 Watts
Radeon R9 M280X		75 Watts
	Difference: 50 Watts (200%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon R9 M280X should in theory perform much faster than the Radeon HD 4550 256MB in general. (explain)

Radeon R9 M280X		88000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4550 256MB		12800 MB/sec
	Difference: 75200 (588%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 M280X will be much (about 950%) better at AF than the Radeon HD 4550 256MB. (explain)

Radeon R9 M280X		50400 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4550 256MB		4800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 45600 (950%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R9 M280X will be much (approximately 500%) better at anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 4550 256MB, and able to handle higher resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

Radeon R9 M280X		14400 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4550 256MB		2400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 12000 (500%)

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 max amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the bandwidth is, 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 applied in one second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core clock 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 in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the graphics card can possibly record to its local memory in one 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 - 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, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.