Radeon HD 5550 vs Radeon R7 240

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon R7 240, which has core clock speeds of 730 MHz on the GPU, and 900 MHz on the 2048 MB of DDR3 RAM. It features 320 SPUs as well as 20 Texture Address Units and 8 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon R7 240 should in theory be much better than the Radeon HD 5550 in general. (explain)

Radeon R7 240		28800 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5550		12800 MB/sec
	Difference: 16000 (125%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R7 240 should be much (more or less 66%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 5550. (explain)

Radeon R7 240		14600 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5550		8800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 5800 (66%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon R7 240 is a better choice, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon R7 240		5840 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5550		4400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 1440 (33%)

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 largest amount of information (measured in MB per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the memory bandwidth, 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 number of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card 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 applied in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the video card can possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core speed of the card. 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 rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.