GeForce 840M vs Radeon HD 5550

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 5550, which uses a 40 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 550 MHz. The DDR2 memory runs at a frequency of 400 MHz on this specific card. It features 320(64x5) SPUs along with 16 Texture Address Units and 8 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the GeForce 840M should theoretically be quite a bit better than the Radeon HD 5550 overall. (explain)

GeForce 840M		16000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5550		12800 MB/sec
	Difference: 3200 (25%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce 840M will be a lot (more or less 181%) more effective at AF than the Radeon HD 5550. (explain)

GeForce 840M		24696 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5550		8800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 15896 (181%)

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the GeForce 840M is a better choice, and very much so. (explain)

GeForce 840M		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 data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are processed in one second. This figure 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 processed per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the graphics card can possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate is also dependant on lots of 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.