GeForce GTX 970M vs Radeon HD 5550

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 5550, which comes with GPU core speed of 550 MHz, and 512 MB of DDR2 RAM running at 400 MHz through a 128-bit bus. It also is made up of 320(64x5) Stream Processors, 16 Texture Address Units, and 8 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

The GeForce GTX 970M, in theory, should perform quite a bit faster than the Radeon HD 5550 in general. (explain)

GeForce GTX 970M		96000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5550		12800 MB/sec
	Difference: 83200 (650%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 970M should be much (about 740%) faster with regards to AF than the Radeon HD 5550. (explain)

GeForce GTX 970M		73920 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5550		8800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 65120 (740%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 970M will be much (more or less 908%) faster with regards to AA than the Radeon HD 5550, and also should be capable of handling higher resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

GeForce GTX 970M		44352 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5550		4400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 39952 (908%)

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 maximum amount of data (measured in MB per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in one second. It is calculated by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, 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 texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the graphics card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the video card could possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.