GeForce GTX 960M vs Radeon HD 5550

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 5550, which uses a 40 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 550 MHz. The DDR2 RAM runs at a speed of 400 MHz on this card. It features 320(64x5) SPUs as well as 16 TAUs and 8 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the GeForce GTX 960M is 400% faster than the Radeon HD 5550 in general, because of its higher data rate. (explain)

GeForce GTX 960M		64000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5550		12800 MB/sec
	Difference: 51200 (400%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 960M should be quite a bit (more or less 398%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 5550. (explain)

GeForce GTX 960M		43840 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5550		8800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 35040 (398%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high resolution is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 960M is superior to the Radeon HD 5550, by a large margin. (explain)

GeForce GTX 960M		17536 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5550		4400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 13136 (299%)

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 max amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface within a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are processed in one second. This is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the video card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card can possibly write to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the the card's clock speed. 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 lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.