Radeon HD 5550 vs Radeon R5 M230

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon R5 M230, which features clock speeds of 780 MHz on the GPU, and 1000 MHz on the 2048 MB of DDR3 RAM. It features 320 SPUs as well as 20 Texture Address Units and 4 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon R5 M230 will be 25% quicker than the Radeon HD 5550 in general, because of its greater data rate. (explain)

Radeon R5 M230		16000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5550		12800 MB/sec
	Difference: 3200 (25%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R5 M230 should be a lot (more or less 77%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 5550. (explain)

Radeon R5 M230		15600 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5550		8800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 6800 (77%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 5550 is quite a bit (about 41%) more effective at full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon R5 M230, and should be able to handle higher resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

Radeon HD 5550		4400 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R5 M230		3120 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 1280 (41%)

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 (in units of MB per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in one second. It's calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the graphics card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.