GeForce 820M vs Radeon HD 4550 256MB

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 4550 256MB, which comes with a GPU core clock speed of 600 MHz, and 256 MB of DDR3 RAM running at 800 MHz through a 64-bit bus. It also is made up of 80(16x5) Stream Processors, 8 TAUs, and 4 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 820M		15 Watts
Radeon HD 4550 256MB		25 Watts
	Difference: 10 Watts (67%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the GeForce 820M should in theory be a lot better than the Radeon HD 4550 256MB in general. (explain)

GeForce 820M		16000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4550 256MB		12800 MB/sec
	Difference: 3200 (25%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce 820M will be a lot (about 140%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 4550 256MB. (explain)

GeForce 820M		11504 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4550 256MB		4800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 6704 (140%)

Pixel Rate

If running with lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the GeForce 820M is the winner, not by a very large margin though. (explain)

GeForce 820M		2876 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4550 256MB		2400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 476 (20%)

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 (counted in MB per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface within a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, 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 amount of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card could possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.