Radeon HD 4550 512MB vs Radeon R9 M390X

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon R9 M390X, which uses a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 723 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM works at a frequency of 1250 MHz on this particular card. It features 2048 SPUs as well as 128 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 4550 512MB		25 Watts
Radeon R9 M390X		125 Watts
	Difference: 100 Watts (400%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon R9 M390X should in theory be quite a bit better than the Radeon HD 4550 512MB overall. (explain)

Radeon R9 M390X		160000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4550 512MB		12800 MB/sec
	Difference: 147200 (1150%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 M390X is much (approximately 1828%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 4550 512MB. (explain)

Radeon R9 M390X		92544 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4550 512MB		4800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 87744 (1828%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R9 M390X is quite a bit (more or less 864%) faster with regards to anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 4550 512MB, and capable of handling higher screen resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

Radeon R9 M390X		23136 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4550 512MB		2400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 20736 (864%)

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 (counted in MB per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface within a second. It's calculated by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the memory bandwidth, the faster 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 processed in one second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the video 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 maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.