Radeon HD 4550 512MB vs Radeon R5 M255

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon R5 M255, which comes with core speeds of 940 MHz on the GPU, and 1000 MHz on the 2048 MB of DDR3 memory. It features 320 SPUs as well as 20 Texture Address Units and 8 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon R5 M255 will be 25% quicker than the Radeon HD 4550 512MB in general, because of its higher bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon R5 M255		16000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4550 512MB		12800 MB/sec
	Difference: 3200 (25%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R5 M255 is much (approximately 292%) better at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 4550 512MB. (explain)

Radeon R5 M255		18800 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4550 512MB		4800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 14000 (292%)

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon R5 M255 is superior to the Radeon HD 4550 512MB, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon R5 M255		7520 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4550 512MB		2400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 5120 (213%)

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 data (in units of MB per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface within a second. It is calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the graphics card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels per second.

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