Radeon R5 M255 vs Radeon R9 M385X

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon R9 M385X, which comes with a clock speed of 1100 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1500 MHz. It also makes use of a 128-bit bus, and uses a 28 nm design. It is made up of 896 SPUs, 56 Texture Address Units, and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon R9 M385X should be much faster than the Radeon R5 M255 in general. (explain)

Radeon R9 M385X		96000 MB/sec
Radeon R5 M255		16000 MB/sec
	Difference: 80000 (500%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 M385X is much (about 228%) faster with regards to AF than the Radeon R5 M255. (explain)

Radeon R9 M385X		61600 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R5 M255		18800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 42800 (228%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon R9 M385X is the winner, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon R9 M385X		17600 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R5 M255		7520 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 10080 (134%)

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 data (counted in MB per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in one second. The number is calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This 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 applied in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the graphics card can possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core 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 fill rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.