GeForce GTX 880M vs Radeon HD 5550

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 5550, which makes use of a 40 nm design. AMD has set the core frequency at 550 MHz. The DDR2 RAM is set to run at a speed of 400 MHz on this specific card. It features 320(64x5) SPUs as well as 16 Texture Address Units and 8 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the GeForce GTX 880M should be quite a bit faster than the Radeon HD 5550 overall. (explain)

GeForce GTX 880M		128000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5550		12800 MB/sec
	Difference: 115200 (900%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 880M should be much (more or less 1288%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 5550. (explain)

GeForce GTX 880M		122112 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5550		8800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 113312 (1288%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 880M is the winner, by far. (explain)

GeForce GTX 880M		30528 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5550		4400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 26128 (594%)

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 largest amount of information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are applied per 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 better this number, the better the graphics card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant 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.