Radeon HD 5550 vs Radeon R7 M260

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon R7 M260, which makes use of a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 715 MHz. The DDR3 RAM runs at a frequency of 1000 MHz on this specific model. It features 384 SPUs along with 24 TAUs and 8 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon R7 M260 should perform quite a bit faster than the Radeon HD 5550 in general. (explain)

Radeon R7 M260		16000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5550		12800 MB/sec
	Difference: 3200 (25%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R7 M260 should be a lot (approximately 95%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 5550. (explain)

Radeon R7 M260		17160 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5550		8800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 8360 (95%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon R7 M260 is a better choice, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon R7 M260		5720 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5550		4400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 1320 (30%)

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 transferred over the external memory interface within a second. It's worked out by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core clock 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 in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the graphics card can possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to 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 ability to get to the max fill rate.