GeForce 840M vs Radeon HD 4550 512MB

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 4550 512MB, which makes use of a 55 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 600 MHz. The GDDR3 RAM works at a frequency of 800 MHz on this particular card. It features 80(16x5) SPUs along with 8 TAUs and 4 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 4550 512MB		25 Watts
GeForce 840M		30 Watts
	Difference: 5 Watts (20%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the GeForce 840M should theoretically be a lot better than the Radeon HD 4550 512MB overall. (explain)

GeForce 840M		16000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4550 512MB		12800 MB/sec
	Difference: 3200 (25%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce 840M should be a lot (more or less 415%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 4550 512MB. (explain)

GeForce 840M		24696 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4550 512MB		4800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 19896 (415%)

Pixel Rate

If running with lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the GeForce 840M is superior to the Radeon HD 4550 512MB, by a large margin. (explain)

GeForce 840M		8232 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4550 512MB		2400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 5832 (243%)

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 its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the 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 can possibly record to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.