GeForce GTX 850M vs Radeon HD 5550

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 5550, which features a clock speed of 550 MHz and a DDR2 memory speed of 400 MHz. It also makes use of a 128-bit bus, and uses a 40 nm design. It is comprised of 320(64x5) SPUs, 16 Texture Address Units, and 8 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

The GeForce GTX 850M should theoretically be a lot faster than the Radeon HD 5550 overall. (explain)

GeForce GTX 850M		32000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5550		12800 MB/sec
	Difference: 19200 (150%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 850M should be much (approximately 298%) more effective at AF than the Radeon HD 5550. (explain)

GeForce GTX 850M		35040 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5550		8800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 26240 (298%)

Pixel Rate

If using lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 850M is superior to the Radeon HD 5550, by far. (explain)

GeForce GTX 850M		14016 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5550		4400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 9616 (219%)

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 largest amount of information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface in a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the memory bandwidth, the better 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 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 video 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 maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip can possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.