GeForce 830M vs Radeon HD 5550

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 5550, which makes use of a 40 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 550 MHz. The DDR2 memory runs at a speed of 400 MHz on this model. 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

The GeForce 830M should in theory be just a bit faster than the Radeon HD 5550 in general. (explain)

GeForce 830M		14400 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5550		12800 MB/sec
	Difference: 1600 (13%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce 830M should be a lot (approximately 87%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the Radeon HD 5550. (explain)

GeForce 830M		16464 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5550		8800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 7664 (87%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high screen resolution is important to you, then the GeForce 830M is the winner, and very much so. (explain)

GeForce 830M		8232 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5550		4400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 3832 (87%)

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 information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in a second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the faster 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 number of texture units 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 processed in a second.

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