GeForce GTX 860M vs Radeon HD 4550 512MB

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 4550 512MB, which uses a 55 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 600 MHz. The GDDR3 RAM runs at a frequency of 800 MHz on this particular card. It features 80(16x5) SPUs along with 8 TAUs and 4 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 4550 512MB		25 Watts
GeForce GTX 860M		45 Watts
	Difference: 20 Watts (80%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the GeForce GTX 860M should perform much faster than the Radeon HD 4550 512MB in general. (explain)

GeForce GTX 860M		64000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4550 512MB		12800 MB/sec
	Difference: 51200 (400%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 860M will be much (approximately 1494%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 4550 512MB. (explain)

GeForce GTX 860M		76512 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4550 512MB		4800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 71712 (1494%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 860M will be a lot (more or less 431%) better at FSAA than the Radeon HD 4550 512MB, and also should be able to handle higher screen resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

GeForce GTX 860M		12752 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4550 512MB		2400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 10352 (431%)

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 max amount of information (counted in MB per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the memory bandwidth, the better 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 can be applied per second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the graphics card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card could possibly write to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the number of ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.