Radeon R9 M290X vs Radeon RX 550

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon RX 550, which features core clock speeds of 1100 MHz on the GPU, and 1750 MHz on the 2048 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 512 SPUs as well as 32 Texture Address Units and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon RX 550		50 Watts
Radeon R9 M290X		100 Watts
	Difference: 50 Watts (100%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon R9 M290X should theoretically be quite a bit superior to the Radeon RX 550 in general. (explain)

Radeon R9 M290X		153600 MB/sec
Radeon RX 550		114688 MB/sec
	Difference: 38912 (34%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 M290X will be much (about 93%) better at texture filtering than the Radeon RX 550. (explain)

Radeon R9 M290X		68000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon RX 550		35200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 32800 (93%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R9 M290X is a lot (approximately 55%) more effective at anti-aliasing than the Radeon RX 550, and also able to handle higher screen resolutions better. (explain)

Radeon R9 M290X		27200 Mpixels/sec
Radeon RX 550		17600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 9600 (55%)

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 information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface within a second. It's worked out by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The better 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 a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics card can possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of ROPs 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 many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.